I'm working on a Java application for people learning German, and I have run into a problem with the special characters of this language. I want to make a subclass of JTextField that will interpret ALT + a as ä, ALT + o as ö and so on, while behaving as usual for all ASCII characters.
My attempts so far:
public class GermanTextField extends JTextField implements KeyListener{
public GermanTextField() {
init();
}
// other constructors ...
private void init() {
addKeyListener(this);
}
public void keyPressed(KeyEvent arg0) {}
public void keyReleased(KeyEvent arg0) {}
public void keyTyped(KeyEvent evt) {
if(evt.getKeyChar() == 'o' && evt.isAltGraphDown()){
setText(getText() + "ö");
evt.consume();
}
}
}
Code above does not work (GermanTextField
behaves like standard JTextField), and when I print evt.getKeyChar()
to console this is what I get:
?
?
?
?
This may be due to my own language, because ALT + o produces ó on my system. Of course I could have done it like that:
public void keyTyped(KeyEvent evt) {
if(evt.getKeyChar() == 'ó'){
setText(getText() + "ö");
evt.consume();
}
}
But it probably won't work on any systems other than Polish.
My question is: is there any solution to this problem that will behave as expected on systems with different language settings?
Full solution to this problem, based on MvGs answer:
package daswort.gui;
import java.awt.event.KeyEvent;
import java.awt.event.KeyListener;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
import javax.swing.JTextField;
public class GermanTextField extends JTextField implements KeyListener{
private Map<Integer, String> transform =
new HashMap<Integer, String>();
public GermanTextField() {
init();
}
public GermanTextField(int columns) {
super(columns);
init();
}
public GermanTextField(String text, int columns) {
super(text, columns);
init();
}
public GermanTextField(String text) {
super(text);
init();
}
private void init() {
transform.put(KeyEvent.VK_A, "äÄ");
transform.put(KeyEvent.VK_U, "üÜ");
transform.put(KeyEvent.VK_O, "öÖ");
addKeyListener(this);
}
public void keyPressed(KeyEvent evt) {
if(evt.isAltGraphDown()){
String umlaut = transform.get(evt.getKeyCode());
if(umlaut != null){
int idx = evt.isShiftDown() ? 1 : 0;
setText(getText() + umlaut.charAt(idx));
}
}
}
public void keyReleased(KeyEvent arg0) {}
public void keyTyped(KeyEvent evt) {
if(evt.isAltGraphDown()){
evt.consume();
}
}
}