Trigger Hotkey Text Expansion on Send

[]MR[]

Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious, I'm a step up from an AutoHotKey beginner and have searched everywhere for an answer. Maybe I don't know the proper terminology, but here is what I would like to do:

I have to often reference documents from a list of several dozen and have successfully made hotstrings to call them up. For example:

Code: Select all

;Document List Hotstrings
::abc0101::ABC-01.01 Title One
::abc0202::ABC-01.02 Title Two
::def0101::DEF-01.01 Title Three
::def0102::DEF-01.02 Title Four

Works like a charm. However, I would like to be able to enclose the title of the document in double brackets on occasion. What I would like to do is to be able to type the basic hotstring to get the unbracketed title in some cases, and in others add a bracket at the beginning of the hotstring to have it trigger the double brackets to enclose the title. What that looks like is something like:

abc0101 > ABC-01.01 Title One
[abc0101 > [[ABC-01.01 Title One]]

Now, I could duplicate all the hotstrings and make two versions, one with brackets, one without, but what I would really like to do is something like below; which would read my hotstring, decide if there is a leading "[" and then choose whether or not to enclose the title based on that.

The problem is, SendInput only sends the hotstring and it doesn't trigger the text expansion. I end up with something like [[abc0101]] instead of [[ABC-01.01 Title One]]. Is it even a possibility to do what I want to do, or is there a better way to do this? I feel like I'm missing some simple thing, but I can't find anything addressing this.

Here is my _not working_ vision of what the code should look like (which would be paired with the document hostring list, of course):

Code: Select all

#k::
Input, UserInput, L8, {enter}
FirstChar := SubStr(UserInput, 1, 1) ; What is the first character of the UserInput?
if (FirstChar = "[") 
{
Chop := SubStr(UserInput, 2) ;remove the leading bracket
SendInput, [[%Chop%]] ;enclose the title in brackets
} else {
SendInput, %UserInput% ;otherwise send the title without brackets
}
return

As I said, the text doesn't expand and leaves me with the hotstring, not the full title of the document.

Thank you for any help you can provide.

MR