pyHook giving wrong ASCII values

Question

I was working on a keylogger to learn a bit about pyHook, but it seems like event.Ascii gives me the wrong ASCII values. For example I get 0 for any symbol or number, 1 for A (should be 65), etc.

import pyHook, pythoncom

def OnKeyboardEvent(event):
    key = chr(event.Ascii)
    print(key)
    return 0
hm = pyHook.HookManager()
hm.KeyDown = OnKeyboardEvent
hm.HookKeyboard()
pythoncom.PumpMessages()

I found a kind of a fix for it, which is using event.KeyID instead of event.Ascii. However, because of that I only get letters and numbers - symbols are totally wrong.

Is this a Python problem, or some kind of keyboard problem?

Same question here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37865445/pyhook-keydown-wrong-event-ascii-values , but no answers. — RemcoGerlich, Jan 14 '17 at 16:31
@RemcoGerlich: that poster's sample output disappeared, so it's no longer useful ... ("And that's why, kids, you should never include textual output as an image.") — Jongware, Jan 14 '17 at 16:35
@RadLexus It was a Pastebin link, not an image. But yeah, I left a note for the OP. — Tagc, Jan 14 '17 at 16:39
had a quick look and when i tried with print('Ascii:', event.Ascii, chr(event.Ascii)) ,I am getting correct output for numbers (tested in python 3.4) — ClumsyPuffin, Jan 14 '17 at 18:04

dominik andreas · Answer 1 · 2018-05-26T16:11:19.150

Parsing the KeyIDs manually seems to be the only option, here's how I did it:

import logging
import pyHook, pythoncom

def on_keyboard_event(event):
    mappings = {None: "<backspace>", 8: "<del>", 13: "\n", 27: "<esc>", 32: " ", 46: "<del>", 91: "<win>",
                160: "<shft>", 162: "<ctr>", 164: "<alt>", 165: "<ralt>", 9: "<tab>",
                48: "0", 49: "1", 50: "2", 51: "3", 52: "4", 53: "5", 54: "6", 55: "7", 56: "8", 57: "9",
                37: "←", 38: "↑", 39: "→", 40: "↓",
                192: "ö", 222: "ä", 186: "ü", 187: "+", 191: "#",
                188: ",", 190: ".", 189: "-", 219: "ß", 221: "´",
                }

    try:
        id = event.KeyID
        char = mappings.get(id, chr(id).lower())
        if not id in mappings and char not in alpha:
            char = "<%s,%s>" % (char, str(event.KeyID))
        print(char, end="")
    except Exception as e:
        logging.exception(e)

    return True


hm = pyHook.HookManager()
hm.KeyDown = on_keyboard_event
hm.HookKeyboard()
pythoncom.PumpMessages()

This is for a German keyboard layout, so you may want to edit the mappings. Some keys are also still missing, so feel free to extend or improve this post.

pyHook giving wrong ASCII values

1 Answers1