Java Robot can be very usefull tool emulating e.g. pressing a key on your keyboard. Sometimes this can be difficult especially for non-standard characters like ‘asterisk’. Therefore I developed following piece of code which translates given string into separated chars, converts them to ASCII and Java Robot types them using ALT+ASCII_KEY

// The purpose is to translate given string to sparated characters 
// which are typed one by one using their corresponding ASCII value
// This value is then translated to KeyCodes 
// VK_NUMPAD0 - VK_NUMPAD9 (96 - 105)
private void TypeString(String data){
// Example data: data = "Hello World"
// First loop: c = 'H'
  for (char c : data.toCharArray()){		
//  ASCII code for 'H': charcode_int = 72
    int charcode_int = (int)c;
			
//  charcode = "72"
    String charcode = Integer.toString(charcode_int);
    robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_ALT);
			
//  First loop: ascii_c = '7'
    for (char ascii_c : charcode.toCharArray()){
//    ascii_n = 103 (= VK_NUMPAD7)
      int ascii_n = Integer.parseInt(String.valueOf(ascii_c)) + 96;					
      robot.keyPress(ascii_n);
      robot.keyRelease(ascii_n);
    }
			
    robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_ALT);
  }
}