Python method for reading keypress

Question

I m new to Python  and I just made a game and a menu in Python  Question is  that using  raw  input   requires me to press enter after every keypress  I d like to make it so that pressing down-arrow will instantly select the next menu item  or move down in the game  At the moment  it requires me to like type  down  and then hit enter  I also did quite a lot of research  but I would prefer not to download huge modules  e g  pygame  just to achieve a single keyDown   method  So are there any easier ways  which I just couldn t find   Edit  Just found out that msvcrt getch   would do the trick  It s not keyDown    but it works  However  I m not sure how to use it either  it seems quite weird  any help here  This is what I got at the moment   from msvcrt import getch while True      key   getch       print key    However  it keeps giving me all these nonsense bytes  for example  down-arrow is this   b  xe0  b P    And I have no idea how to use them  I ve tried to compare with chr   and even use ord   but can t really do any comparisons  What I m trying to do is basically this   from msvcrt import getch while True      key   getch       if key    escape          break     elif key    downarrow          movedown       elif key     a                 And so on    Any help

User · Answer

from msvcrt import getch  pos    0  0   def fright        global pos     pos 0     1  def fleft        global pos      pos 0  -  1  def fup        global pos     pos 1     1  def fdown        global pos     pos 1  -  1  while True      print Distance from zero     pos     key   ord getch        if key    27   ESC         break     elif key    13   Enter         print  selected       elif key    32   Space         print  jump       elif key    224   Special keys  arrows  f keys  ins  del  etc           key   ord getch            if key    80   Down arrow             print  down               fdown         elif key    72   Up arrow             print  up               fup           elif key    75   Left arrow             print  left               fleft           elif key    77   Right arrow             print  right               fright

User · Answer

It s really late now but I made a quick script which works for Windows  Mac and Linux  simply by using each command line  import os  platform  def close        if platform system       quot Windows quot           print  quot Press any key to exit       quot           os system  quot pause gt nul quot           exit            elif platform system       quot Linux quot           os system  quot read -n1 -r -p   quot Press any key to exit        quot  key quot           exit            elif platform system       quot Darwin quot           print  quot Press any key to exit       quot           os system  quot read -n 1 -s -p   quot   quot  quot           exit            else          exit    It uses only inbuilt functions  and should work for all three  although I ve only tested Windows and Linux

User · Answer

Figured it out by testing all the stuff by myself  Couldn t find any topics about it tho  so I ll just leave the solution here  This might not be the only or even the best solution  but it works for my purposes  within getch s limits  and is better than nothing   Note  proper keyDown   which would recognize all the keys and actual key presses  is still valued   Solution  using ord  -function to first turn the getch   into an integer  I guess they re virtual key codes  but not too sure  works fine  and then comparing the result to the actual number representing the wanted key  Also  if I needed to  I could add an extra chr   around the number returned so that it would convert it to a character  However  I m using mostly down arrow  esc  etc  so converting those to a character would be stupid  Here s the final code   from msvcrt import getch while True      key   ord getch        if key    27   ESC         break     elif key    13   Enter         select       elif key    224   Special keys  arrows  f keys  ins  del  etc           key   ord getch            if key    80   Down arrow             moveDown           elif key    72   Up arrow             moveUp     Also if someone else needs to  you can easily find out the keycodes from google  or by using python and just pressing the key   from msvcrt import getch while True      print ord getch

User · Answer

I really did not want to post this as a comment because I would need to comment all answers and the original question  All of the answers seem to rely on MSVCRT Microsoft Visual C Runtime  If you would like to avoid that dependency    In case you want cross platform support  using the library here  https   pypi org project getkey  files https   github com kcsaff getkey Can allow for a more elegant solution   Code example  from getkey import getkey  keys key   getkey   if key    keys UP           Handle the UP key elif key    keys DOWN           Handle the DOWN key elif key     a            Handle the  a  key elif key     Y            Handle  shift-y  else      Handle other text characters   buffer    key   print buffer

User · Answer

See the MSDN getch docs   Specifically      The  getch and getwch functions read a single character from the console without echoing the character  None of these functions can be used to read CTRL C  When reading a function key or an arrow key  each function must be called twice  the first call returns 0 or 0xE0  and the second call returns the actual key code    The Python function returns a character   you can use ord   to get an integer value you can test  for example keycode   ord msvcrt getch      So if you read an 0x00 or 0xE0  read it a second time to get the key code for an arrow or function key   From experimentation  0x00 precedes F1-F10  0x3B-0x44  and 0xE0 precedes arrow keys and Ins Del Home End PageUp PageDown

User · Answer

I was also trying to achieve this  From above codes  what I understood was that you can call getch   function multiple times in order to get both bytes getting from the function  So the ord   function is not necessary if you are just looking to use with byte objects   while True       if m kbhit             k   m getch           if b  r     k               break         elif k    b  x08 or k    b  x1b                 b  x08    gt  BACKSPACE               b  x1b    gt  ESC             pass         elif k    b  xe0  or k    b  x00               k   m getch               if k in  b H  b M  b K  b P  b S  b  x08                      b H    gt  UP ARROW                   b M    gt  RIGHT ARROW                   b K    gt  LEFT ARROW                   b P    gt  DOWN ARROW                   b S    gt  DELETE                 pass             else                  print k decode   end             else              print k decode   end       This code will work print any key until enter key is pressed in CMD or IDE  I was using VS CODE  You can customize inside the if for specific keys if needed

[python] Python method for reading keypress?

Examples related to python

Examples related to windows

Examples related to key

Examples related to keydown

Examples related to getch