How to read a single character from the user?

Question

Is there a way of reading one single character from the user input? For instance, they press one key at the terminal and it is returned (sort of like getch()).

Answer 1

The ActiveState's recipe seems to contain a little bug for "posix" systems that prevents Ctrl-C from interrupting (I'm using Mac). If I put the following code in my script:

while(True):
    print(getch())

I will never be able to terminate the script with Ctrl-C, and I have to kill my terminal to escape.

I believe the following line is the cause, and it's also too brutal:

tty.setraw(sys.stdin.fileno())

Asides from that, package tty is not really needed, termios is enough to handle it.

Below is the improved code that works for me (Ctrl-C will interrupt), with the extra getche function that echo the char as you type:

if sys.platform == 'win32':
    import msvcrt
    getch = msvcrt.getch
    getche = msvcrt.getche
else:
    import sys
    import termios
    def __gen_ch_getter(echo):
        def __fun():
            fd = sys.stdin.fileno()
            oldattr = termios.tcgetattr(fd)
            newattr = oldattr[:]
            try:
                if echo:
                    # disable ctrl character printing, otherwise, backspace will be printed as "^?"
                    lflag = ~(termios.ICANON | termios.ECHOCTL)
                else:
                    lflag = ~(termios.ICANON | termios.ECHO)
                newattr[3] &= lflag
                termios.tcsetattr(fd, termios.TCSADRAIN, newattr)
                ch = sys.stdin.read(1)
                if echo and ord(ch) == 127: # backspace
                    # emulate backspace erasing
                    # https://stackoverflow.com/a/47962872/404271
                    sys.stdout.write('\b \b')
            finally:
                termios.tcsetattr(fd, termios.TCSADRAIN, oldattr)
            return ch
        return __fun
    getch = __gen_ch_getter(False)
    getche = __gen_ch_getter(True)

References:

• https://pypi.python.org/pypi/getch