Keycodes that might be appropriate here...

From: YYZ (notapplicable)
Date: 05/13/04 

Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 15:55:16 -0500

What would be a good "start of transmission" one character delimeter that won't
interfere with other things on a computer when sent via SendKeys? I need 2 of
them -- one for start and one for end (yeah, I could get away with one, but I
would prefer different characters for each. Chr$(1) and Chr$(2)? That's the
basic question. Here's the long explanation.

Strange situation, but please give some thoughts if you feel so inclined.

There is a 3rd party application that our company uses for doing what we call
takeoff. Takeoff is basically measuring the lengths of walls on blue prints and
turning that into lineal footages. So, I'd look at my blueprints, and measure
all of the outside walls, and that would end up being 400 LF for example.

How our estimators do this is by laying all the plans out on a digitizer (big
flat thing connected via serial port) and marking the start and stop point of
wall segments. We have a 3rd party app that takes that distance, applies a
scale to it, and comes up with LF.

The estimator then presses a special button on their menu card (don't get bogged
down on that) and the 3rd party program uses findwindow api (I'm assuming) and
sendkeys to send that value to our application, into the active control (in this
case it is a cell in far point grid, but it can also be a textbox or any control
that takes user input).

Now we have a chance to have the 3rd party programmers create a set of special
functions just for our company. So, we have decided that we'd like to receive
the data from this other app in this kind of form:

(special delimeter)#A#R#S(special delimeter). The # means any number -- 123.34
for example. The A, R and S are Add, Replace, and Subtract respectively.

For the special delimeters, I'm wondering what characters to use. I'd like to
use a different one for starting and ending (so it's easier on us to know
exactly what's happening), and I want to make SURE that I don't use characters
that will confuse Windows. For example, previously, they were using F10 as one
of the delimeters (in a different kind of text sending scheme), which will
possibly mess up an application that has a File menu. Doesn't F10 put the focus
on the File menu if one exists? I kind of remember that...

Anyone have any ideas for me on this?

Thanks in advance for any responses.

Matt