ASCII CHR() CODE CHART for QTP UFT Selenium Playwright and Cypress

What is ASCII and Why it's Helpful to Know

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and it is a character encoding scheme based on the English alphabet.

Why does this matter?

For software development or automation of keyboard or mouse actions using automation tools like Unified functional testing or Selenium, this is very helpful.

For example, QuickTest Professional (QTP) and Unified Functional Testing (UFT) have two built-in functions (ASC and Chr) that are helpful to know when you need to work with ASCII info.

Read on to learn more about:

• The importance of knowing ASCII, including CHR(10) and other common codes
• How to use these character codes 
• How to send keyboard keys using Selenium, Playwright, and Cypress

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Common ASCII Codes (The Most Used By QTP, And UFT Or Any Other Tool)

Here are some of the most common QTP ASCII character codes I often use:

Chart for All the Valid Chr() Codes

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How can you actually use this?

ASC() Function

ASC()  is a QTP function that returns the code of the character passed to it. For example, if you wanted to know what the ASCII/ANSI code for the pound symbol #:

Msgbox Asc(“#”),

The above will return the code 35

Chr() Function

If you wanted to enter or search for the pound key in a string, you would use the QTP Chr() function. This function will return the character associated with the code passed to it. For example,

Msgbox Chr(35)

will return the pound sign.

That's not all…

What about mouse and keyboard actions in UFT or QTP?

There may be a time when you actually need to perform mouse or keyboard actions using screen coordinates. For a step-by-step example of how to do this with QuickTest Professional or Unified Functional Testing check out:

QTP Secret Code Chart Revealed For DeviceReplay PressKey, KeyDown, KeyUp and PressNKeys

Or

3 Ways to use keyboard input in QuickTest Professional or Unified Functional Testing

* Entering/Reading ASCII codes – when using Unified Functional Testing, previously known as Quick Test Professional (QTP) – is sometimes needed to achieve certain functionality. (For Selenium, check out Send_Keys)

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What about Sending Keyboard Keys using Selenium?

If you're using Selenium for your test automation and you need to pass a keypress as you do in QTP, you're in luck.

Selenium has a send_keys command to send a keypress.

First, you need to import the org.openqa.selenium.Keys; library. Then, when you create your script, use the

.sendKeys(Keys.ENUM) syntax.

Here are some valid values you can pass:

* For more advanced actions check out the Advanced User Interactions post on SeleniumHQ

Send Keys using Playwright

Playwright's keyboard.press method simulates keyboard events in the browser. It takes a key as an argument and triggers a keydown, keypress, and keyup event in the browser. The key argument can be either a string or a key definition object.

Here is an example of how to use the keyboard.press method in Playwright to simulate pressing the ‘Enter' key:

await page.keyboard.press(‘Enter');

You can also simulate pressing multiple keys at once by passing an array of key definitions as the argument:

await page.keyboard.press([‘Shift', ‘KeyA']);

In addition to the keyboard.press method, Playwright's keyboard API also provides other methods such as keyboard.down, keyboard.up, and keyboard.type to simulate other keyboard events.

Here's an example of how to use keyboard.type to simulate typing a string of text:

await page.keyboard.type(‘Hello, World!');

This will simulate pressing each key on the keyboard in sequence to type out the text “Hello, World!” in the active input field.

Overall, the keyboard API in Playwright is powerful and flexible, allowing you to simulate a wide range of keyboard events and interactions in the browser.

Here is the full table of ASCII codes and how to use them with Playwright:

Send Keys using Cypress