Printing UTF-8 Characters with accents about robotjs

[rsify]

robot.typeString('!@#$%^&*()') returns 1234567890 on windows, probably related.

[octalmage]

There's always a way! Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I'll look into it when I get some time.

[octalmage]

I looked into this for a few minutes and I believe the issue is in keypress.c. I'm curious if this is an issue on Windows though. I'll update when I have more time to test.

[octalmage]

Uh oh! That's silly.

[Deltatiger]

I will check this out on windows when I have the time.

[octalmage]

The Windows issue mentioned by @nikersify was fixed in #110.

[amaramth]

https://github.com/octalmage/robotjs/blob/master/src/keypress.c#L224 typeString prints one byte at a time; probably that's a utf8 string & any characters outside of ascii take more than one byte; it needs to handle this.

I'd love to get this fixed, but I don't know enough C to send a good pull request. I'm sure I could hack together something bad that works, though - would that help?

[giacomocerquone]

Same problems here!
Let's try to explain it better. Let me point out that all the problems, bugs or whatever have been tested on Windows 10.

The exact problem reported from @nikersify is not present anymore. Point is that maybe the fix didn't include the keyTap function. In fact if I execute robot.keyTap('!'); it prints "1", it should be very easy, I think that the same fix used for typeString must be used over keyTap.
I would fix it by myself and submit a PR if I only be good in C... but the functions seem a bit complex to me so I trust in you 😄 @octalmage

Then skipping to the acceented words, there is a strange and inconsistent behavior between typeString and keyTap. Both of them don't work, but if I write robot.typeString('à'); and execute the script, it does nothing (it doesn't print "à" nor an error) but if I write robot.keyTap('à'); and execute, I get this:

robot.keyTap('�'); // That is an unknown char for the console and it's marked by an empty square
      ^

Error: Invalid key code specified.
    at Error (native)
    at Object.<anonymous> (C:\Users\test.js:5:7)
    at Module._compile (module.js:541:32)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:550:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:456:32)
    at tryModuleLoad (module.js:415:12)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:407:3)
    at Function.Module.runMain (module.js:575:10)
    at startup (node.js:160:18)
    at node.js:445:3

[amoshydra]

Hi,

is sending Chinese character related to this issue? Chinese character doesn't work with robot.typeString on my Windows 10 machine.

I notice that keypress.c is using keybd_event to simulate keypress.

However, I have stumbled upon a question on stackoverflow about sending unicode with c++ on Windows.

It seems to suggest that sendInput should be used instead of keybd_event for sending unicode.

[dexmendonca]

Same bug on Linux