Question

I have a small program that takes input in the form of ascii characters. I need to be able to convert these to keycodes for use with x11 functions. Is there a xlib function to do this or another library? Or will a large switch case work best?

Answer 1

You can use XStringToKeysym to convert at least alphanumeric characters to KeySyms, followed by XKeysymToKeycode for conversion to KeyCodes:

Display *display = ...;
KeySym sym_a = XStringToKeysym("A");
KeyCode code_a = XKeysymToKeycode(display, sym_a);

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As @BobDoolitle pointed out in his answer, while XStringToKeysym works for alphanumeric single-character strings, it fails in the ASCII general case. He provides a way to trivially handle the majority of ASCII characters (0x20–0x7F) although characters outside that range require more careful treatment.