How to emulate press and hold with pywin32

Question

I am trying to write a python script to send a press and hold key signal. Right now all I have managed to do is the following:

import win32com.client
shell = win32com.client.Dispatch("Wscript.Shell")
shell.SendKeys("z")

However, this only sends an instantaneous key pressed event. What I would like to do is a key down and key up, something along the lines of:

shell.SendKeys("z{down}")
time.sleep(.25) 
shell.SendKeys("z{up}")

But I cannot find any documented way to achieve this.

EDIT: I also tried something along the lines of this:

import time
import win32com.client
import win32api
import win32gui
import win32con

time.sleep(2)
shell = win32com.client.Dispatch("Wscript.Shell")
win32api.SendMessage(win32con.HWND_TOP, win32con.WM_CHAR, 90, 0) 
win32api.SendMessage(win32con.HWND_BROADCAST, win32con.WM_KEYDOWN, 90, 1) 
time.sleep(.25)
win32api.SendMessage(win32con.HWND_BROADCAST, win32con.WM_KEYUP, 90, 1) 

The whole HWND thing is really a mystery to me - from the documentation I can't figure out how the hell to grab the correct window. Also, WM_CHAR seems to work, but WM_KEYDOWN/KEYUP hasn't really done anything.

Answer 1

You can use win32api.PostMessage to send WM_KEYDOWN and WM_KEYUP messages. See MSDN for documentation of the parameters. The constants are defined in win32con module.