On Sun, Feb 19, 2017 at 12:13 AM, Douglas Crawford via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:

:)
How to poll the keyboard for a keypress, non blocking.

Python

#!/usr/bin/env python
 
import __future__
import sys
if sys.version_info.major < 3:
    import thread as _thread
else:
    import _thread
import time
 
 
try:
    from msvcrt import getch  # try to import Windows version
except ImportError:
    def getch():   # define non-Windows version
        import tty, termios
        fd = sys.stdin.fileno()
        old_settings = termios.tcgetattr(fd)
        try:
            tty.setraw(sys.stdin.fileno())
            ch = sys.stdin.read(1)
        finally:
            termios.tcsetattr(fd, termios.TCSADRAIN, old_settings)
        return ch
 
char = None
 
def keypress():
    global char
    char = getch()
 
_thread.start_new_thread(keypress, ())
 
while True:
    if char is not None:
        print("Key pressed is " + char.decode('utf-8'))
        break
    print("Program is running")
    time.sleep(5)

PureBasic

Returns a character string if a key is pressed during the call of Inkey(). It doesn't interrupt (halt) the program flow.

If special keys (non-ASCII) have to be handled, RawKey() should be called after Inkey().

k$ = Inkey()

​I use python for some little things here too

Never having tried this in python, so I had to look this up​

not sure where that code which you found came from

I just looked on the python org website

And there appears to be a "getkey" library 

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/getkey/0.6.5

eg.

from getkey import getkey, keys 

key = getkey() 

if key == keys.UP:

 ... # Handle the UP key 

elif key == keys.DOWN:

 ... # Handle the DOWN key 

else:

 # Handle other text characters 

 buffer += key 

 print(buffer)