keyToggleChar – A tool to enter UTF-8 national chars via keyboard

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• Download keyToggleChar Source (C/C++, VS2005, Mobile 6 SDK) (Hits: 1, size: 35.92 KB)

As you may know, my keyToggle app is able to use the number keys on a Windows mobile device as function keys. Here is another one that enables you to enter special national chars, like Å, Ä Æ etc. directly via the keyboard. You must specify 10 keys and their UTF-8 replacements. Configuration is done via the registry:

3.0        added code for read/write reg for CharTable and KeyTable
 REGEDIT4

 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Intermec\KeyToggleChar]
 "KeyTable"=hex:\
 30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39
 "CharTable"=hex:\
 C6,00,E6,00,D8,00,F8,00,C5,00,E5,00,C2,00,E2,00,C4,00,E4,00
 "LEDid"=dword:00000001
 "autoFallback"=dword:00000000
 "Timeout"=dword:00000003
 "StickyKey"=dword:00000074

 KeyTable     holds a list of 10 keys which will be 'remapped'
 CharTable    holds  list of UniChar codes to use as replacement
 LEDid        defines the ID of the LED to use for showing sticky state
 autoFallback defines, if the sticky state is reset after a mapped key is pressed.
              Use 0, if you dont want the sticky state to fallback after keypress
 TimeOut      defines a timout after which sticky state will be reset

To get the UTF-8 word entries for Unicode chars, see for example: http://www.unicode.org/charts/charindex.html.

The default mapping used here is defined as follows and maps the keys 0-9 to:

0x00c6, 0x00e6, 0x00d8, 0x00f8, 0x00C5, 0x00e5, 0x00c2, 0x00e2, 0x00c4, 0x00e4
 AE        ae     O/       o/      A°      a°      A^      a^      Ä       ä

The main problem I had was finding a function to get the window handle of the current input active window. Finally I found GetForegroundKeyboardTarget() (after some days of searching).

void sendKey(UINT vKey){
 TCHAR* lpText;
 lpText = new TCHAR[MAX_PATH];
 TCHAR strClass[MAX_PATH];
 int iRes;
 
 // hWndActive = GetFocusEx(); // a trick that does not deliver the focusses window
 hWndActive = GetForegroundKeyboardTarget();
 
 GetWindowText(hWndActive, lpText, MAX_PATH-1);
 iRes = GetClassName(hWndActive, strClass, MAX_PATH);
 DEBUGMSG(1, (L"### GetFocusEx() window, handle=0x%x, 
	text='%s', class='%s'\n", hWndActive, lpText, strClass));
 
 if(hWndActive == NULL)
 return; //no window found
 
 WPARAM wParam = getCharForKey(vKey); // charTable[vKey-0x30];// 0x00c6; //AE
 LPARAM lParam = 1; //flags: repeat=1
 
/*
 wm_keydown, wParam=0, lParam=1
 wm_char, wParam=char code, lParam=1
 wm_keyup, wParam=0, lParam=c0000001;
*/
 
 LRESULT lRes=0;
 lRes = SendMessage(hWndActive, WM_KEYDOWN, 0, 1);
 DEBUGMSG(1, (L"SendMessage1 for 'WM_KEYDOWN' returned 0x%0x\n", lRes));
 lRes = SendMessage(hWndActive, WM_CHAR, wParam, 1);
 DEBUGMSG(1, (L"SendMessage2 for '0x%04x' returned 0x%0x\n", wParam, lRes));
 lRes = SendMessage(hWndActive, WM_KEYUP, 0, 0xc0000001);
 DEBUGMSG(1, (L"SendMessage3 for 'WM_KEYUP' returned 0x%0x\n", lRes));
 
 return;
}

I left my different finding in code (commented out), so you can see what functions I have tried.

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