I have an issue in a program where I am detecting key presses. All characters are working on QUERTY keyboards but I am aware of issues with certain characters on AZERTY keyboards.
For example, when \ is pressed on an AZERTY keyboard, it is given the keycode of 226 (â).
How can I ensure that the behaviour is consistent across keyboard layouts? I expected the inbuilt event handling to be consistent.
On
I cannot reproduce that at all. Backslash is composed on an AZERTY keyboard by holding down AltGr and then pressing the 8 key on the row of numbers above the letters. When you do that the following KeyDown events are fired:
On the other hand, if you press the key immediately to the left of W then a KeyDown with KeyCode OemBackslash and KeyValue 226 is fired, and a < character appears in the text box.
I wonder if your keyboard layout is not set correctly to match your particular keyboard. I'm assuming that your keyboard looks like the image on this Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY
On
Yes, different keyboard layouts give different key codes. The documentation describes VK_OEM_102 (keycode 226) as "<>" or "\|" on RT 102-key keyboard, so the keycode isn't even supposed to correspond to a single particular character.
To see which character a key corresponds to, use the MapVirtualKey function. You can then check whether it's a backslash.
You might want to first detect the keyboard layout and then use a different keycode to character mapping.