Special Character Limitation in Global Send Keys

[naveed_raza]

Hi All,

These days , password characters and length, specially password characters has lot of special characters.

We have an automation in place it was running fine from last 4 years, however all of sudden its started giving an issue , we are using Global Send Keys to enter credential as those textboxes is not accepting via normal Write stage.

Global Send Keys its not entering all the characters properly and we thought of adding Interval however we are getting an error as "When we specify Interval then few special characters will not work", this is weird.

as an alternative , we are planning to go with Copy and Paste functionality, however want to know about this limitation and in some cases we have to go with Global Send Keys only.

How we can make this step more reliable and what is the best practice here ? or we have to post this in Product Idea or not to make that Global Send Keys allow all special characters ?
@Michael_S  

[naveed_raza]

Thank you so much dave for putting your way of doing this, for now what i am doing is just to be sure that what ever we entered that is correct.

Logic here is , 

Clear Clipboard > Copy Clipboard (password) > activate browser > focus on textbox > control A > control V > read clipboard value > verify clipboard value with actual password (based on decision acting) > clear clipboard

[Anton__Hosang]

For those scenarios where passwords cannot be pasted into the field (because the app doesn't allow it), I use a code stage  - maybe put it in your Strings VBO.

The code is a one-liner to produce an escaped output: 

SendKeys_Escaped_Output = Regex.Replace(Input_Text, "[\[\]{}+^%~()]", "{$0}")

[naveed_raza]

Thank you so much @Anton__Hosang  , this regex covers all types of special characters which is reserved in blueprism ?

[Anton__Hosang · Accepted solution]

I think they're all in that list (2nd parameter to the Replace function/method). FYI, this is nothing to do with Blue Prism - it is how sendkeys has always been in Windows.

SendKeys Class (System.Windows.Forms) | Microsoft Learn

[naveed_raza]

@Anton__Hosang - thank you so much , i have tried this in built Escape SendKeys String action to create escape characters.