How do you make Robot type out a variable String?

Question

I don't know why I'm having an issue with this. I want the Robot class to type out a string one character at a time as if I were sitting at the keyboard and doing it myself. There will be many, variable strings to type. Here is what I tried to do and it fails miserably:
private String myString = "example";
// Loop for each character in the string
for(int i=0; i<numChars; i++)
     // Get the current character
     myChar = myString.charAt(i);
     // Convert the character to a keycode
     myKC = (int)myChar;
     // Press the key, release the key
     myRobot.keyPress(myKC);
     myRobot.delay(10);
     myRobot.keyRelease(myKC);
}When I run it, I get some unexpected output in the Notepad window I have open. Instead of it spelling out "example", it gives me something entirely different:
e - instead of 'e', it gives me a '5'
x - instead of 'x', it gives me nothing at all
a - instead of 'a', it gives me a '1'
m - instead of 'm', it gives me a '-'
p - instead of 'p', 'F1' is triggered and the Notepad help window pops open
l - instead of 'l', it gives me nothing at all
e - instead of 'e', it gives me another '5'
What am I doing wrong here? This was supposed to be easy...
Edited by: ConQuesimo on Jan 19, 2010 12:06 AM

Answer 1

ConQuesimo wrote:
     // Convert the character to a keycode
     myKC = (int)myChar;
I don't see a keycode conversion here, keycodes for a to z are the same as ASCII, what I do see is an int conversion of what ever character set you have running on your computer. If I take your approach to conversion, then I get different codes on different keyboards/systems also. What I finally ended up doing is making a map for my keys and everything started working fine.
For me, the problem expressed itself when I went from my Windows with MS-Keyboad to my Ubuntu with an earlier style MS-Keyboad. Character values and single character strings come out fine, but when I would try converting char to KeyCode as you have done, the results were not always what was desired. I've not looked into it to see what was actually causing the problem, ti was faster and easier just to make the map.