Escaping the # & % _ hotkey modifiers in a menuItem

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1

How do you use the shortcut modifiers (#, &, %, _) in a MenuItem string without them being interpreted at hotkey modifiers?

For example:

[MenuItem("File/Foo & Bar %l")]

should show up as File > Foo & Bar ⌘L, and not File > Foo ⌥Space.

Clearly it is possible, as File > Build & Run ⌘B does it.

3 Answers

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What worked for me (Unity 2018.4) was simply doubling the hotkey character:

 [MenuItem("File/Foo && Bar %l")]
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I may have stumbled on a way to solve this issue. It’s not really pretty, but it seems to work. Since the hotkeys are picked up after a whitespace character, you need to place a character before the “&” that won’t/can’t be displayed by Unity. I did this by escaping an undefined ASCII symbol(in hex) right before the “&”. (Any in the range of 7F to 9F)

for example:

[MenuItem("File/This \x8B& That")]

Sneaky. Unless a less hacky answer comes along, I'll accept this as the answer.

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I played around with this a little more. Instead of using an "undefined" ASCII character, there is a "non-breaking space" (hex A0) that is displayed as a space, but doesn't get interpreted as the start of a hotkey definition. [MenuItem("File/This\xA0& That")] A little less hacky, but I am also still curious how Unity does this internally.

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I'm quite struggling with this, could you provide an example with the shortcut letter 'a' and a [MenuItem("Window/Test")]?

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3

The “Best Answer” doesn’t work for me on Unity 5.6.6f2.

I’m using the Fullwidth Ampersand \uff06, i.e. ＆.

[MenuItem("Window/Mesh Terrain Editor/Help/Feature Request \uff06 Bug Report", false, 9004)]

Mesh Terrain Editor