[Haskell-cafe] How to getCh on MS Windows command line?

[Ahn, Ki Yung]

Matti Niemenmaa 쓴 글:
> Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
>> 1. works for me in ghc:
>>
>> getHiddenChar = liftM (chr.fromEnum) c_getch
>> foreign import ccall unsafe "conio.h getch"
>>    c_getch :: IO CInt

Thanks to Bulat, Bayley, and Matti for suggestions and discussions.

At least for my purpose of running the particular example I had "conio.h 
getch" is good enough because the entire example only depends on the 
getCh for its input.

I defined getCh as follows and it seems to works OK on windows cmd.

\begin{code}
{-# LANGUAGE ForeignFunctionInterface#-}
import Monad
import Char
import Foreign.C

getCh = liftM (chr . fromEnum) c_getch
foreign import ccall "conio.h getch" c_getch :: IO CInt

\end{code}

Just want to make a comment that this "conio.h getch" will only work on 
windows cmd but not on linux terminals.  Both on ghc 6.8.2 and ghc 
6.10.1 throws an error when I try to do getCh

kyagrd at kyagrd:~/MyDoc$ ghci-6.8.2 Main
GHCi, version 6.8.2: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help
Loading package base ... linking ... done.
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( Main.hs, interpreted )
Ok, modules loaded: Main.
*Main> getCh
*** Exception: Prelude.chr: bad argument


I hope we can have more portable way of handling command line buffering 
in the future releases GHC.

Thanks, for you all again.

> Depending on your use case, that's an okay workaround. (And probably suitable
> for the OP as well.)
> 
> But unfortunately conio doesn't mix well with ordinary IO. For one, it always
> reads from the console and not stdin, so redirecting stdin won't work. Another
> problem is illustrated in the following:
> 
> main = do
>    a <- getChar
>    b <- getHiddenChar
>    c <- getChar
>    print a
>    print b
>    print c
> 
> Type a, then press enter, then b. The result (including the echoed input):
> 
> a
> 'a'
> 'b'
> '\n'
> 
> I don't know where that '\n' came from but it certainly shouldn't be there.
> 
> Yet another example: type abcd, then press enter, giving:
> 
> abcd
> 'a'
> '\r'
> 'b'
> 
> The fact that newlines are reported as '\r' and not '\n' is easy enough to deal
> with, but I wonder why getch chose to give '\r' and not 'b'?