SendInput() not equal to pressing key manually on keyboard in C++?

You can use SendInput() to send hardware scan codes as well (as opposed to virtual scan codes, which DirectInput might ignore). It’s poorly documented, but SendInput() can indeed bypass DirectInput. The reason Eric’s solution didn’t work is he set the hardware scan code, but ended up using a virtual scan code (by setting dwFlags to 0 and wVk to non-zero).

Essentially, to do a key press you want to set:

ip.ki.dwFlags = KEYEVENTF_SCANCODE;

And to do a key release, set:

ip.ki.dwFlags = KEYEVENTF_SCANCODE | KEYEVENTF_KEYUP;

A full working sample is below and it prints the letter ‘a’. You can find other scan codes here.

#define WINVER 0x0500
#include <windows.h>

using namespace std;

int main()
{

    //Structure for the keyboard event
    INPUT ip;

    Sleep(5000);

    //Set up the INPUT structure
    ip.type = INPUT_KEYBOARD;
    ip.ki.time = 0;
    ip.ki.wVk = 0; //We're doing scan codes instead
    ip.ki.dwExtraInfo = 0;

    //This let's you do a hardware scan instead of a virtual keypress
    ip.ki.dwFlags = KEYEVENTF_SCANCODE;
    ip.ki.wScan = 0x1E;  //Set a unicode character to use (A)

    //Send the press
    SendInput(1, &ip, sizeof(INPUT));

    //Prepare a keyup event
    ip.ki.dwFlags = KEYEVENTF_SCANCODE | KEYEVENTF_KEYUP;
    SendInput(1, &ip, sizeof(INPUT));



    return 0;
}

Note: You can combine keypresses (like, shift + a for A) by passing SendInput() an array of INPUT structures.