Question

I am writing some code to type strings using the Robot class. Everything is mostly good (well, I have to use a big switch statement to get character keycodes), except some keys don’t have keycodes, because they are actually a combination of Shift + some other key. For upper case letters, it is easy to check, using Character.isUpperCase(c), but for all the symbols such as !@#$%^&*()_+ and various punctuation are not considered “upper case” although they do require shift to be pressed in order to generate thier keystroke. I tried googling for it, but just found a forum post with no satisfactory answers. Is there any way to determine whether a character needs shift to be pressed, and if so, what character is the “un-shifted” version?

EDIT: Here is the code I have so far.

public void GenerateKeyTyped(char c) {
    if (Character.isUpperCase(c)) {
        r.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_SHIFT);
    }
    r.keyPress(GetKeyCode(c));
    r.keyRelease(GetKeyCode(c));
    if (Character.isUpperCase(c)) {
        r.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_SHIFT);
    }
}

Answer 1

I don’t know a way to solve your problem directly ( I just ended up using a Map for those characters) but it might give you some ideas:

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;

public class Main3 {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            Robot robot = new Robot();

            HashMap<String, String> map = new HashMap<String, String>();
            map.put("!", "1");
            map.put("@", "2");
            map.put("#", "3");

            char[] charz = "abcdefgABCDEFG123!#".toCharArray();

            for(int i = 0; i < charz.length; i++)
            {
                System.out.print(charz[i] + " : ");
                boolean shiftRequired = false;
                String key = String.valueOf(charz[i]);
                String value = map.get(key);

                if (value != null)
                {
                    shiftRequired = true;
                    key = value;
                }
                else if (Character.isUpperCase(key.charAt(0)))
                {
                    shiftRequired = true;
                }
                else
                {
                    key = key.toUpperCase();
                }

                KeyStroke ks = KeyStroke.getKeyStroke("pressed " + key.toUpperCase());

                int keyCode = ks.getKeyCode();
                System.out.println(keyCode);

                if (shiftRequired)
                    robot.keyPress(java.awt.event.KeyEvent.VK_SHIFT);

                robot.keyPress( keyCode );
                robot.keyRelease( keyCode );

                if (shiftRequired)
                    robot.keyRelease(java.awt.event.KeyEvent.VK_SHIFT);
            }


        } catch(Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}