Get the character typed by the user

Question

I want to process the characters typed by the user for a game (I don't want to use an input tag with a submit button).

I managed to get the keyCode typed with this code:

window.on.keyPress.add((Event e) 
{
    window.alert('${e.keyCode},${e.keyIdentifier},${e.charCode}');

});

but I don't know how to display the character of the key pressed (or even get the character of the key as a string). In Javascript there is a fromKeyCode() function but not in Dart.

Anyway, I am looking for the simplest way to get the keyboard inputs for processing and I would prefer not have to fiddle with keycodes and such.

Answer 1

String.fromCharCodes() is gone

import 'dart:convert';

String result = UTF8.decode([e.charCode]); // or [e.keyCode]

Answer 2

You can construct a new string from the character code with String.fromCharCodes().

var str = new String.fromCharCodes([e.charCode]);

However it's certainly not the most efficient to be creating a new string each time a user hits a key depending on your game. If you only expect a few specific characters to be hit and ignore others then you may want to create constant/final variables of character codes to compare the character code from the event.

final E_KEY = "e".charCodeAt(0);
// ... etc.

Keep in mind these don't account for various situations such a capitalization, or the CTRL or ALT or meta key pressed, etc.