Receive any Keyboard input and use with Switch statement on Unity

Question

I don\'t want to use if statement. For simplicity and performance I want to use switch case and execute that method. I want all the keyboard Input to get detected. But is there

Answer 1

I've not used Unity, however, I understand your problem and I am a C# developer.

From a quick search I have found someone on Unity forums with a similar problem to you. Here is the thread https://answers.unity.com/questions/1520939/check-if-there-is-a-keyboard-input.html.

if (Input.anyKeyDown)
 {
     Event e = Event.current;
     if (e.isKey)
     {
         Debug.Log("Current Key is : " + e.keyCode.ToString());
     }
 }

The code above (from the Unity forum link) enables you to detect input.anyKeyDown (keyboard and mouse). Then you can filter the mouse detections by checking if the input was only a keyboard input with e.isKey

Here is documentation for KeyCode. This also includes all the properties available to it (many keyboard related properties that you can potential check against).

For example (not tested):

Event e = Event.current;
if (e.isKey)
{
    Debug.Log("Current Key is : " + e.keyCode.ToString());

    if(e.keyCode == KeyCode.A) //checks if the keycode returned equals the 'A' key
    {
         // Do something
    }
}

EDIT: As mentioned by the other answer you can try Input.inputString. According to the documentation insputString contains "Only ASCII characters". So for example you could do something like this in the 'Update' method if letters was what you were only looking to check.

void Update()
{
    //get the input
    var input = Input.inputString;

    //ignore null input to avoid unnecessary computation
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(input))
    {
        switch(input)
        {
            case 'a': break;
            case 'b': break;
        }
    }
}

Hope this can help.

Answer 2

Best Solution - Use Input.inputString

You may use Input.inputString to catch the keyboard input entered in the last frame as a string.

void Update()
{
    //get the input
    var input = Input.inputString;
    //ignore null input to avoid unnecessary computation
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(input))
        //logic related to the char pressed
        Debug.Log("Pressed char: " + Input.inputString);
}

---

Other solutions

Foreach Loop

You might use foreach loop approach, like suggested in other answers, but it is not as performant. Foreach allocates more memory and must check against all possible keys (it is also less readable).

If you do not care about time and memory performance, then you might follow this answer. It uses the foreach loop approach and create a reusable interface.

---

OnGUI

Finally you could catch the Event.current (that is a unityGUI Event), like explained in this answer, but doing so you would rely on the OnGUI method. This method has the worst performance.

Answer 3

foreach(KeyCode kcode in Enum.GetValues(typeof(KeyCode)))
{
    if (Input.GetKey(kcode))
    Debug.Log("KeyCode down: " + kcode);
}

Also you can cache the value of Enum.GetValues(typeof(KeyCode)) for optimization.