Programmatically change Windows keyboard language

Dear colleagues

I am writing an application which uses the numbers in the top row of the keyboard as keyboard shortcuts to trigger some functions. I use WindowKeyPressFcn and event.Key to get which key was pressed by the user.

I live in Czechia and most people here have two keyboards installed on their computers: Czech keyboard and English keyboard. On the Czech keyboard, however, the numbers in the top row are substituted by letters with accents (in Czech language we use them a lot). My application, however, does not work when the input is those special Czech characters instead of numbers.

1) Is there a way to read the key codes instead of the current character, which would be independent of which keyboard is set in Windows?

2) Is there a way to programmatically change the keyboard to English (e.g. whenever the user runs my application)?

I am using Matlab R2019b.

Thank you for any suggestions

Jan Kudláček (you can see the letters with accents in my surname :-) )

Answer 1

[Rahul]

Hi @Jan Kudlacek,

I understand that you face the issue of 'WindowKeyPressFcn' not recognising the corrcet key press for Czech characters. While there is no Native solution for MATLAB for this case. Here is a workaround which might be useful:

• Mapping the required key characters from the Czech keyboard to English. Here is an example:

function myKeyPressFcn(src, event)
    czechToEnglish = struct('plus','1','ě','2','š','3','č','4','ř','5','ž','6','ý','7','á','8','í','9','é','0');
    if isfield(czechToEnglish, event.Key)
        mappedKey = czechToEnglish.(event.Key);
        disp(['Mapped to: ', mappedKey]);
        % call your function for the number here
    else
        disp(['Pressed: ', event.Key]);
    end
end

MATLAB itself cannot change the Keyboard Layout to English. However, if required you can make use of system commands or third party libraries.

Thanks.

[Jan Kudlacek]

Hi Rahul,

Thank you for the answer but it does not work since the letters with accents are not valid struct field names.

Jan

[Steven Lord]

You could use a dictionary instead.

czechToEnglish = dictionary('plus','1','ě','2','š','3','č','4','ř','5',...
    'ž','6','ý','7','á','8','í','9','é','0');
czechToEnglish('ě')

ans = "2"

Or if you want the values to be numbers:

czechToEnglish2 = dictionary('plus',1,'ě',2,'š',3,'č',4,'ř',5,...
    'ž',6,'ý',7,'á',8,'í',9,'é',0);
czechToEnglish2('ě')

ans = 2

[Jan Kudlacek]

That works! Thank you.

Jan