Unbuffered character input for python on a windows machine

Question

What I am trying to do

I am trying to design a stopwatch with lap timing. When you press \"L\" then a lap is completed and when you press \"S\" all

Answer 1

This is what I've used that seems to work in a Windows console. It's somewhat similar to that ActiveState recipe except that it only works on Windows. It's based on this msdn documentation for _getwch().

#### windows only ####
import msvcrt

def readch(echo=True):
    "Get a single character on Windows."
    while msvcrt.kbhit():  # clear out keyboard buffer
        msvcrt.getwch()
    ch = msvcrt.getwch()
    if ch in u'\x00\xe0':  # arrow or function key prefix?
        ch = msvcrt.getwch()  # second call returns the actual key code
    if echo:
        msvcrt.putwch(ch)
    return ch

def pause(prompt='Press any key to continue . . .'):
    if prompt:
        print prompt,
    readch(echo=False)

(Updated to handle Unicode).

Answer 2

If you are asking about how to read input without input, you probably are looking for binding This requires a Tkinter window, I believe.

lapEnded = bind_all("<KeyPress-l>", endLap)
stopRunning = bind_all("<KeyPress-s", noMoreRunning)

Then, you define the functions endLap and noMoreRunning, which do their functions. Depending on your version of Tkinter and/or Python, bind_all may simply be bind. Hope this answers your question.