Does or Can VBscript's SendKeys support Unicode?

Question

I am finding that VBscript's SendKeys does not support Unicode. It supports some like A-65, but not foreign letters like the letter Aleph (א) from the Hebrew alphabet. Prob outside its supported range. Could be for decimal values of 128+, it gives a "?", and it only supports the ASCII range.

I can type and see Hebrew letters on my computer using Windows XP. So the OS support for the characters is there and set up. My source code demonstrates that, since the line

msgbox Chrw(1488)

displays the Aleph character and I've displayed it in Notepad and MS Word.

It looks to me like it is sending a question mark for a character it doesn't recognize. I think MS Word or Notepad if they did have a problem displaying a character (e.g. when the font doesn't support a char), they would display a box rather than a question mark. Certainly in the case of Notepad anyway. So it looks like a SendKeys issue. Any ideas? Any kind of workaround?

Dim objShell

Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

objShell.Run "notepad" ''#can change to winword

Wscript.Sleep 2000

msgbox Chrw(1488)  ''#aleph

objShell.SendKeys ("abc" & ChrW(1488) & "abc")  ''#bang, it displays a ? instead of an aleph

WScript.Quit

Answer 1

You're most likely right in your guess that VBscript's SendKeys doesn't support Unicode.

Monitoring of Windows API function calls performed by SendKeys using Blade API Monitor on Russian Windows XP with English US, Russian and Hebrew keyboards) shows that SendKeys isn't Unicode aware. Specifically, SendKeys does the following:

1. Calls the ANSI (not Unicode) version of the VkKeyScan function — VkKeyScanA — to get the virtual key code of the character to be sent. This function translates the character into VK_SHIFT + VK_OEM_2, so it seems that somewhere before or in the process the Aleph character is converted into a different, ANSI character.

2. Calls the SendInput function to send the VK_SHIFT + VK_OEM_2 keystrokes instead of the Aleph character.

The main problem here is that to send a Unicode character, SendInput must be called with the KEYEVENTF_UNICODE flag and the character in question must be passed via the function parameters — the experiment shows that none of this is the case. Also, VkKeyScan isn't actually needed in case of a Unicode character, as SendInput itself handles Unicode input.

Given this, the only way to send Unicode input to an application from VBScript is to write a custom utility or COM component that will utilize SendInput properly and to call this utility/component from your script. (VBScript doesn't have any native means to access Windows API.)

Note added by barlop: While VBScript's obj.SendKeys(..) isn't Unicode-aware, VB's SendKeys.Send(..) would be.

Answer 2

I'm using Dragon Naturally Speaking with hebrew, and SendKeys indeed cannot send hebrew characters even though they show in the macro editor, however, what I did was set the clipboard with the hebrew text that I wanted, and then SendKeys with Ctrl-V for paste, and that does works, it's just SendKeys that messes with the encoding.

Clipboard("טקסט בעברית")
SendKeys("^V")

That would override the users clipboard and won't work for mixing command characters (Ctrl,Alt,Shift) with hebrew characters, but it's a work around.

Answer 3

You can get around this by using:

wshShell.SendKeys "1488+({LEFT}{LEFT}{LEFT}{LEFT})%(x)"

This uses a windows keyboard shortcut from here.

Answer 4

Try setting the font to Microsoft Sans Serif in Notepad.