Language keyboard

[xinyiman]

Hello guys, anyone of you tell me how can I do to track down the alphabet on the keyboard? If possible a cross-platform solution.

thanks

[Avishai]

This code is for Windows Only, but it may get you started.  It returns a Language ID number as a string.

function GetKeybLayout: string;
var
  buffer: array[0..KL_NAMELENGTH-1] of char;
begin
  if getkeyboardlayoutname(buffer) then
    setstring(result, buffer, strlen(buffer));
  else
    raise exception.create('Failed to get the layout.');
end;

[xinyiman]

Thank you, someone else knows how to do it with Linux?

[zeljko]

Yes, first read /etc/X11/xorg.conf (if exists), if not read $LANG.
But be aware of this since some distros pack keyboard info into /etc/sysconfig.
Update: keyboard info should be /etc/sysconfig/keyboard (recent distros, just checked Fedora14 and SuSe11.04) BUT ONLY /etc/X11/xorg.conf doesn't have different setup.
So, first check if xorg.conf exists, and if yes -> check if there's keyboard entry. If not , then attack /etc/sysconfig/keyboard

[Avishai]

Maybe we should write a cross-platform wrapper around this and add it to Lazarus LCL.  I think this should be a commonly needed piece of information.

[ludob]

On a recent ubuntu the keyboard layout is in /etc/default/console-setup and /etc/X11/xorg.conf isn't present anymore
Parsing the output of setxkbmap -print seems to work for most distributions.