How to simulate Press any key to continue

Question

I am trying to write a C   program in which when user enter any character from keyboard and it should move to next line of code   Here is my code   char c   cin gt  gt c   cout lt  lt  Something  lt  lt endl    but this is not working  because it only move to next line when I input some character and then press ENTER   OR  If I use this  cin get   or cin get c    it move to next line of instruction when I press Enter   But I wanted it to move to next line on any key pressed on the keyboard  how this can be done

User · Answer

You could use the Microsoft-specific function  getch    include  lt iostream gt   include  lt conio h gt                       cout  lt  lt   Press any key to continue      lt  lt  endl   getch    cout  lt  lt   Something   lt  lt  endl

User · Answer

Another option is using threads with function pointers   include  lt iostream gt   include  lt thread gt     this thread  sleep for   and thread objects  include  lt chrono gt     chrono  milliseconds    bool stopWaitingFlag   false   void delayms int millisecondsToSleep       std  this thread  sleep for std  chrono  milliseconds millisecondsToSleep       void WaitForKey        while  stopWaitingFlag    false          std  cout lt  lt  quot Display from the thread function quot  lt  lt std  endl      delayms 1000             int main       std  thread threadObj  amp WaitForKey      char userInput     0     while  userInput     y           std  cout  lt  lt   quot  e 1 31mWaiting for a key  Enter  y  for yes e 0m quot   lt  lt  std  endl      std  cin  gt  gt  userInput      if  userInput     y           stopWaitingFlag   true              if  threadObj joinable        threadObj join       std  cout lt  lt  quot Exit of Main function quot  lt  lt std  endl    return 0

User · Answer

If you re using Visual Studio 2012 or older  use the getch   function  if you are using Visual Studio 2013 or newer  use  getch    You will have to use  include  lt conio h gt   Example    include  lt iostream gt   include  lt conio h gt   int main        std  cout  lt  lt   Press any key to continue      n       getch      Or getch

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If you look up kbhit   function on MSDN now  it says the function is deprecated  Use  kbhit   instead    include  lt conio h gt  int main          kbhit        return 0

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I looked into what you are trying to achieve  because I remember I wanted to do the same thing  Inspired by Vinay I wrote something that works for me and I sort of understand  But I am not an expert  so please be careful    I don t know how Vinay knows you are using Mac OS X  But it should work kind of like this with most unix-like OS  Really helpful as resource is opengroup org  Make sure to flush the buffer before using the function    include  lt stdio h gt   include  lt termios h gt           termios  TCSANOW  ECHO  ICANON  include  lt unistd h gt        STDIN FILENO   void pressKey           the struct termios stores all kinds of flags which can manipulate the I O Interface       I have an old one to save the old settings and a new      static struct termios oldt  newt      printf  Press key to continue     n           tcgetattr gets the parameters of the current terminal       STDIN FILENO will tell tcgetattr that it should write the settings        of stdin to oldt     tcgetattr  STDIN FILENO   amp oldt         now the settings will be copied      newt   oldt         two of the c lflag will be turned off       ECHO which is responsible for displaying the input of the user in the terminal       ICANON is the essential one  Normally this takes care that one line at a time will be processed       that means it will return if it sees a   n  or an EOF or an EOL     newt c lflag  amp     ICANON   ECHO                 Those new settings will be set to STDIN       TCSANOW tells tcsetattr to change attributes immediately       tcsetattr  STDIN FILENO  TCSANOW   amp newt          now the char wil be requested     getchar           the old settings will be written back to STDIN     tcsetattr  STDIN FILENO  TCSANOW   amp oldt        int main void      pressKey      printf  END n      return 0      O NONBLOCK seems also to be an important flag  but it didn t change anything for me    I appreciate if people with some deeper knowledge would comment on this and give some advice

User · Answer

Also you can use getch   from conio h  Just like this      includes  defines etc void main       operator getch      now this function is waiting for any key press  When you have pressed its     just       finish and next line of code will be called     So  because UNIX does not have conio h  we can simulate getch   by this code  but this code already written by Vinary  my fail     include  lt stdio h gt   include  lt termios h gt   include  lt unistd h gt   int mygetch        struct termios oldt               newt    int            ch    tcgetattr  STDIN FILENO   amp oldt      newt   oldt    newt c lflag  amp      ICANON   ECHO      tcsetattr  STDIN FILENO  TCSANOW   amp newt      ch   getchar      tcsetattr  STDIN FILENO  TCSANOW   amp oldt      return ch

User · Answer

This works on a Windows Platform   It Uses the Microprocessor registers directly and can be used to check key press or mousebutton       include lt stdio h gt       include lt conio h gt       include lt dos h gt      void main              clrscr         union REGS in out       in h ah 0x00       printf  Press any key             int86 0x16  amp in  amp out        printf  Ascii    d n  out h al        char ch   out h al       printf  Charcter Pressed    c   amp ch        printf  Scan code    d  out h ah        getch

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Just use the system  pause    command     All the other answers over complicate the issue

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There is no completely portable solution   Question 19 1 of the comp lang c FAQ covers this in some depth  with solutions for Windows  Unix-like systems  and even MS-DOS and VMS   A quick and incomplete summary    You can use the curses library  call cbreak   followed by getch    not to be confused with the Windows-specific getch  function    Note that curses generally takes control of the terminal  so this is likely to be overkill  You might be able to use ioctl   to manipulate the terminal settings  On POSIX-compliant systems  tcgetattr   and tcsetattr   may be a better solution  On Unix  you can use system   to invoke the stty command  On MS-DOS  you can use getch   or getche    On VMS  now called OpenVMS   the Screen Management  SMG   routines might do the trick    All these C solutions should work equally well in C    I don t know of any C  -specific solution

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You can use the getchar routine   From the above link      getchar example   typewriter     include  lt stdio h gt   int main        char c    puts   Enter text  Include a dot       in a sentence to exit       do       c getchar        putchar  c       while  c            return 0

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include  lt iostream gt  using namespace std   int main          bool boolean      boolean   true       if  boolean    true             cout  lt  lt   press any key to continue           cin  gt  gt  boolean             return 0

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To achieve this functionality you could use ncurses library which was implemented both on Windows and Linux  and MacOS as far as I know

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If you re on Windows  you can use kbhit   which is part of the Microsoft run-time library  If you re on Linux  you can implement kbhit thus  source     include  lt stdio h gt   include  lt termios h gt   include  lt unistd h gt   include  lt fcntl h gt   int kbhit void      struct termios oldt  newt    int ch    int oldf     tcgetattr STDIN FILENO   amp oldt     newt   oldt    newt c lflag  amp     ICANON   ECHO     tcsetattr STDIN FILENO  TCSANOW   amp newt     oldf   fcntl STDIN FILENO  F GETFL  0     fcntl STDIN FILENO  F SETFL  oldf   O NONBLOCK      ch   getchar       tcsetattr STDIN FILENO  TCSANOW   amp oldt     fcntl STDIN FILENO  F SETFL  oldf      if ch    EOF          ungetc ch  stdin       return 1         return 0      Update  The above function works on OS X  at least  on OS X 10 5 8 - Leopard  so I would expect it to work on more recent versions of OS X   This gist can be saved as kbhit c and compiled on both Linux and OS X with  gcc -o kbhit kbhit c   When run with    kbhit   It prompts you for a keypress  and exits when you hit a key  not limited to Enter or printable keys     Johnsyweb - please elaborate what you mean by  detailed canonical answer  and  all the concerns   Also  re  cross-platform   With this implementation of kbhit   you can have the same functionality in a C   program on Linux Unix OS X Windows - which other platforms might you be referring to   Further update for  Johnsyweb  C   applications do not live in a hermetically sealed C   environment  A big reason for C   s success is interoperability with C  All mainstream platforms are implemented with C interfaces  even if internal implementation is using C    so your talk of  legacy  seems out of place  Plus  as we are talking about a single function  why do you need C   for this   C with classes    As I pointed out  you can write in C   and access this functionality easily  and your application s users are unlikely to care how you implemented it

User · Answer

On Windows   system  pause      and on Mac and Linux   system  read      will output  Press any key to continue     and obviously  wait for any key to be pressed  I hope thats what you meant

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In windows  this short program accomplishes the goal  getch pauses the console until a key is pressed  https   www geeksforgeeks org difference-getchar-getch-getc-getche     include lt iostream h gt   include lt conio h gt   using namespace std   void  check         char chk  int j      cout lt  lt   n nPress any key to continue          chk getch        j chk      for int i 1 i lt  256 i          if i  j  break      clrscr       void main         clrscr        check        cout lt  lt   n nIt works        getch        It should be noted that getch is not part of the standard library

[c++] How to simulate "Press any key to continue?"

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