User Guide

332

keyPressed()

Syntax

the keyPressed

keyPressed (keyCode)

keyPressed (asciiCharacterString)

Description

Function; returns the character assigned to the key that was last pressed if no argument is used. The

result is in the form of a string. When no key has been pressed, the keyPressed is an empty string.

If an argument is used, either a keyCode or the ASCII string for the key being pressed may be

used. In either of these cases, the return value is

TRUE if that particular key is being pressed, or

FALSE if not.

The Director player for Java doesn’t support this property. As a result, a movie playing back as an

applet has no way to detect which key the user pressed while Lingo is in a repeat loop.

The

keyPressed property is updated when the user presses keys while Lingo is in a repeat loop.

This is an advantage over the

key function, which doesn’t update when Lingo is in a repeat loop.

Use the sample movie Keyboard Lingo to test which characters correspond to different keys on

different keyboards.

This property can be tested but not set.

Examples

The following statement checks whether the user pressed the Enter key in Windows or the Return

key on a Macintosh and runs the handler

updateData if the key was pressed:

if the keyPressed = RETURN then updateData

This statement uses the keyCode for the a key to test if it’s down and displays the result in the

Message window:

if keyPressed(0) then put "Key is down"

This statement uses the ASCII strings to test if the a and b keys are down and displays the result

in the Message window:

if keyPressed("a") and keyPressed ("b") then put "Keys are down"