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

If I'm doing something complicated I'll use curses to read keys. But a lot of times I just want a simple Python 3 script that uses the standard library and can read arrow keys, so I do this:

import sys, termios, tty

key_Enter = 13
key_Esc = 27
key_Up = '\033[A'
key_Dn = '\033[B'
key_Rt = '\033[C'
key_Lt = '\033[D'

fdInput = sys.stdin.fileno()
termAttr = termios.tcgetattr(0)

def getch():
    tty.setraw(fdInput)
    ch = sys.stdin.buffer.raw.read(4).decode(sys.stdin.encoding)
    if len(ch) == 1:
        if ord(ch) < 32 or ord(ch) > 126:
            ch = ord(ch)
    elif ord(ch[0]) == 27:
        ch = '\033' + ch[1:]
    termios.tcsetattr(fdInput, termios.TCSADRAIN, termAttr)
    return ch