Support Unicode Characters for .typeString()

[zz85]

Here's is preliminary patch for support unicode characters in robotjs for .typeString().

robot.typeString('Àçćéñtéd'); // works
robot.typeString('你好吗？'); // works
robot.typeString('😆💩🌺😍👍😠🐠😝😢🤣😢🦑'); // works

This fixes #16 #30

It has does simple UTF-8 parsing (without validation) and I have tested this with Chinese and accented characters [edit: and emjios] on MacOS.

However, I have not figured how to have emojis sending yet nor have I have tested it on other platforms although I've tried to make the code changes minimal here.

[zz85]

After some amount of trial and error, it seems CGEventKeyboardSetUnicodeString expects a UTF-16 character instead, will be update this PR once I get it working...

[zz85]

Update: After decoding, characters are re-encoded into UTF-16 to be used with CGEventKeyboardSetUnicodeString. This fixes all sending codepoints higher than 0x10000. That means emojis now work :)

[octalmage]

This is amazing, thank you so much for looking into this. I'll check it out soon!

[zz85]

Yay, I think this is the smallest set of changes to get unicode working but I'm pretty sure there's a better way to structure this. Let me know if you've a way to make it better :)

[alexanderhoehling]

Is it possibile to create a new release for that, there is need in a project and i think more people want to have this support

[zz85]

@octalmage would it be fine to merge this first?

[alexanderhoehling]

of course ... do you know when this will be done?

[lmmfranco]

@octalmage What about merging this PR? Seems a nice addition.

[alexanderhoehling]

I do not have a problem if you merge this pr with #326

[profbiss]

This does not work in Windows

[yalexx]

Hello guys, how can i run this branch locally. I know its noob question but do i have only to pull it or this keypress.c must be compiled. And what is the git command to pull this specific branch.

[harrysarson]

See https://help.github.com/articles/checking-out-pull-requests-locally/#modifying-an-inactive-pull-request-locally.

Which boils down to running the following from your shell from within a clone of the robotjs repository.

git fetch origin pull/276/head:unicode
git checkout unicode

[octalmage]

Sorry everyone! I've been busy, but thanks again! I'll get a new release out this weekend.

[amaramth]

I don't know the best way to do this, but I grabbed HEAD and put it in a release so that I could use this library. https://www.npmjs.com/package/robotjs_head_2017-12-01 . And it works! Thank you zz85 for the fix.

[lmmfranco]

@alice0meta you can use a fork directly as npm dependency. https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/install

[georgehdd]

@octalmage - any chance you will be releasing an official fix soon?

[samantrader]

@zz85 hi how can use your change that support utf in windows version