Non-English keyboards for an English text-based game

[yparghi]

I'm making an adventure game where you type in text commands in English, like this:



I know this is broad, but are there any specific practices or considerations to handle non-English keyboard layouts in my code?

My command input only accepts a-z, 0-9, space, and backspace, so per the SFML tutorial my game loop looks like this:

      if (event.type == sf::Event::TextEntered) {
        if (event.text.unicode < 128) {
          char charEntered = static_cast<char>(event.text.unicode);
          if ((charEntered >= 'A' && charEntered <= 'Z')
              || (charEntered >= 'a' && charEntered <= 'z')
              || (charEntered >= '0' && charEntered <= '9')
              || charEntered == ' '
              || charEntered == '\b') {
            // Show the next letter...
          }
        }
      }
 

In other words, I toss out everything except a handful of ASCII chars.

Does anyone see any pitfalls in this approach with respect to foreign keyboards? Do you think this is generally sufficient so that someone using a French layout, or a bilingual Hindi/English keyboard, will be able to type in English correctly?

I'm not well versed in internationalization issues, so any non-English insight is appreciated.

[eXpl0it3r]

SFML unfortunately still doesn't have proper keycodes, but I think your code should do the trick.
Except that I'm not sure if the unicode <=> char conversion will always work.

[Laurent]

I see nothing wrong with this code. The advantage of the TextEntered event is that it completely abstracts the keyboard layout and input method, it just gives you the resulting character.

[yparghi]

Okay, thank you both. I suspected it was straightforward, I just wanted a second opinion.

[Mario]

I'd simplify it a bit by using "iswalnum()", which allows you to skip all the comparisons except space and backspace.