ControlSend changes case intermittently

[emendelson]

This question has come up in various ways before, but I can't find a solution, and I'm not sure there is one.

I'm trying to use ControlSend to enter a file path in a Windows File/Save dialog box. The plain Send command works perfectly to enter the file path, but I want to hide the application window that I'm sending the file path to, and I think that only ControlSend will work in that situation - as well as being generally more reliable.

What happens is that a path like F:\path\to\myfile gets entered as something like F;\path|tO\myfiLe - with some of the characters that I want to paste replaced with the opposite-case character on the keyboard. For example, the colon becomes a semi-colon and the backslash becomes a vertical. (This is effectively the same thing that was described in an earlier post about Czech letters appearing instead of the intended characters.)

I've tried turning on the raw-characters option; that doesn't help. I've tried putting the path in the Clipboard and then, in ControlSend, using ClipGet() instead of the variable that contains the string. The clipboard method seems to improve things a bit, but I still end up with a semi-colon and not a colon after the drive letter.

Is there any reliable way to get around this problem?

I'm running Windows 10 and trying to enter text in the File/Save box in Softmaker's free TextMaker word-processor. Thanks for any help.

 

Edited November 8, 2019 by emendelson
Clarification.

[Nine]

I have seen that before, it seems that if you are using keyboard or mouse while script is running, ControlSend can get mixed up.

The solution that was suggested is to use my UDF, before and after the ControlSend to block all input before and re-enable input after.

and @BigDaddyO also made a secure control send...

Edited November 8, 2019 by Nine

[emendelson]

Thank you for this - but, but unfortunately, your UDF and @BiggDaddyO's _ControlSendSecure don't seem to solve the problem. In each case, I get this:

 

I know I'm not using the mouse or keyboard while the script runs. I wonder if there's something else going on that's getting in the way?

[Nine]

Is it always the same chars that are converted, or is it randomly distributed ?

[emendelson]

I think the only characters that get converted are the colon (converted to a semi-colon) and the backslash (converted to a vertical). But as you see from the image, this only happens randomly. Sometimes the colon doesn't get converted; only one or two backslashes get converted. Might it be possible to parse the file string and replace the colon and backslashes with specific ASCII characters? (If so, I don't know the best way to do that.)

I can live with changes to the case of the ASCII characters, though of course I would prefer not to. Maybe the best thing would be to convert the whole string into a series of Chr(##) codes?

Edited November 8, 2019 by emendelson

[seadoggie01]

If this is just a Save as window, you could use ControlSetText instead, right? I don't think that actually simulates typing with the keyboard

[emendelson]

4 minutes ago, seadoggie01 said:

If this is just a Save as window, you could use ControlSetText instead, right? I don't think that actually simulates typing with the keyboard

Brilliant! This is a pure case of user-ignorance on my part. That works perfectly, and I should have realized that it would work...

[seadoggie01]

You still probably want to look into what is causing those random capitalizations, but at least you can move past this for now 

[emendelson]

Agreed!

[Stilgar]

Hi,

you can take a look at my UDF for Planmaker:

PlanMaker-UDF

I think you can rebuild something for TextMaker.

e.g.

_PlanMaker_BookAttach
_PlanMaker_BookSaveAs

greetings
  Stilgar

[emendelson]

Stilgar, This is really, really impressive. I will see if I can start by building a reduced version for TextMaker that performs only SaveAs. Thank you.

[emendelson]

Post deleted. I partly figured out the answer...

Edited November 10, 2019 by emendelson

[jchd]

17 hours ago, emendelson said:

I figured out the answer...

Which is?

[emendelson]

51 minutes ago, jchd said:

Which is?

I should have said I partly figured out a solution - I've modified some of Stilgar's UDF simply by replacing the Open and SaveAs commands by equivalents from the TextMaker language, but I can't get the SaveAs to save consistently in the correct format and I can't get it actually to save the file instead of opening the File/Save dialog with the filename and (sometimes) the correct format. I'll continue to work on this and post any solution that seems to work.

[emendelson]

I figured out the question I should ask to solve this problem, which is how to get TextMaker to save changes without prompting. I've asked the question as an issue on Stilgar's Github page.

Edited November 10, 2019 by emendelson