[SDL] OS independent SDL_keysym.scancode

[Sebastian Biallas]

Hi!

I have a question concerning SDL_KeyEvent. I thought this is a fairly 
frequently asked question, but I found nothing about this problem in 
documentation.

Let's suppose I want to program a game where the keys that are covered 
with the '[' and ']' characters on an american keyboard should have a 
certain meaning. Now, I can either interpret the scancode field of 
SDL_keysym struct, but this would make my program platform dependent (I 
would have to "#ifdef __WIN32__" etc.). Or I can use the sym field, 
which provide platform independent keys, but this makes my program 
dependent on the selected "locale" of the user, i.e. a german user would 
have to press AltGr+'8' or AltGr+'9' for the '[' and ']' keys 
respectively. Of course the later option is completely useless if the 
AltGr key had also a certain meaning.

The situation gets even worse when I want to assign meta-keys or dead 
keys (e.g. on my current keyboard layout the spacebar is a modifier 
key). Here I can only fallback to the scancode solution.

It's not that the keyssyms are really bad, they are ok for text 
input-lines etc, where the user expects his current locale, but useless 
for "raw" keyboard accesses.

So, am I missing something, or am I really forced to use the platform 
dependent solution for such things at the moment?

Sebastian