Posted by Lars Eighner on 09/14/07 23:51

In our last episode, <slrnfem6r4.1h1e.usenet@debranded.larseighner.com>, the
lovely and talented Lars Eighner broadcast on comp.lang.php:

> In our last episode, <46eb178b$0$32540$4c368faf@roadrunner.com>, the lovely
> and talented Norman Peelman broadcast on comp.lang.php:

>> Lars Eighner wrote:
>>> The ncurses functions are such a mess (and some of it I suspect is in
>>> ncurses itself) that I am thinking the easiest way to write a terminal
>>> interface is simply to write ANSI directly to the terminal.
>>>
>>> Although the manual on the CLI refers me to readline, readline doesn't
>>> seem provide a way to get a single key press, and so far as I can tell
>>> doesn't provide a reference to how to get a single keypress. I reckon
>>> some widgets would be more spiffy with keypresses instead of whole lines.
>>>
>>> How can I get keypresses?
>>>

>> If you're on Windows, you can't. You have to press the enter key to
>> 'send' the input. Unix/Linux it's supposed to work as expected. Haven't
>> tried it yet though.

> What is "it's" in "it's supposed to work as expected"?

> On FreeBSD readline will not capture key presses (or at least I do not know
> how to do so). If I initiate ncurses to use ncurses_getch, it seizes the
> display so cannot write ANSI to it (and it overwrites any ANSI I have
> written to the screen --- besides which, the whole point of writing an ANSI
> interface is to avoid PHP ncurses which are (is) ugly as hell, largely
> undocumented, inflexible, object-oriented, and tends to crash the terminal
> rather than failing gracefully when it fails.

> It is easy enough to draw widgets by writing ANSI directly to a terminal,
> but if you cannot move the cursor around with the arrow key or open a
> drop-down box with Enter, the widgets are just pretty pictures.


Opps! Never mind. readline() is not suitable for this purpose,
but at least in recent versions of PHP fread will work:

$keypress = fread(STDIN,1);

gets one key from STDIN (and at least in recent versions, the standard
streams are preopened). I have not yet investigated whether or how to flush
STDIN in case of multiple (mistaken) keystrokes, but I'm sure this is the
right track.


--
Lars Eighner <http://larseighner.com/> <http://myspace.com/larseighner>
Countdown: 493 days to go.
What do you do when you're debranded?

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