Get the keyboard input language

Problem/Question/Abstract:

When my application starts, I need to switch the keyboard language to Greek. Currently I use the statement ActivateKeyboardlayout(0, 0). When I need to switch to English (when the application terminates) I execute the same statement one more time. This works fine, but only if the language before the application's execution is English. So, before the call of the statement, I need to know if the language is Greek or English. How can do this?

Answer:

I usually use the following cycle:

{ ... }
GetKeyboardLayoutName(@t);
y := string(t);
repeat
ActivateKeyboardLayout(HKL_NEXT, 0);
GetKeyboardLayoutName(@t);
x := string(t);
until
((x = y) or (x = '00000405'));
{ ... }

Using this, the English keyboard will give the KeyboardLayoutName '00000409' and the Greek one the '000000408'. These are standard language identifiers. They're the same on any Windows machine.

To display the information, you could use this little trick:

{ ... }
var
kbd: array[0..2] of Char;
begin
GetLocaleInfo(loWord(GetKeyboardLayout(0)), LOCALE_SENGLANGUAGE, kbd, 2);
Form1.Caption := kbd;
{ ... }