No relevant answers on the actual behavior of kbhit() on characters such as ", %, ~ in Windows 10 when keyboard and locale are US (not international) - windows

Question

Windows 10 with latest updates installed on a Dell XPS13. US keyboard layout and US locale selected (not international). Still a call to kbhit() or _kbhit() with specific characters such as ", ~, % does not return the key hit, at least mot until a certain amount of time (~1second) and a second character has been hit.
I try to use kbhit() because I need a non-waiting function. How can I detect correctly a keyboard hit on " or % with a single keystroke?
In Linux using a timed-out select() on stdin works great, but doesn't seem to be OK with Windows.
Thanks,
-Patrick

Answer 1

I finally found a solution that fits my needs and fixes the issues I have with kbhit(); code below; I hope it helps others too.
– Patrick
int getkey();
//
// int getkey(): returns the typed character at keyboard or NO_CHAR if no keyboard key was pressed.
// This is done in non-blocking mode; i.e. NO_CHAR is returned if no keyboard event is read from the
// console event queue.
// This works a lot better for me than the standard call to kbhit() which is generally used as kbhit()
// keeps some characters such as ", `, %, and tries to deal with them before returning them. Not easy
// the to follow-up what's really been typed in.
//
int getkey() {
INPUT_RECORD buf; // interested in bKeyDown event
DWORD len; // seem necessary
int ch;
ch = NO_CHAR; // default return value;
PeekConsoleInput(GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE), &buf, 1, &len);
if (len > 0) {
if (buf.EventType == KEY_EVENT && buf.Event.KeyEvent.bKeyDown) {
ch = _getche(); // set ch to input char only under right conditions
} // _getche() returns char and echoes it to console out
FlushConsoleInputBuffer(GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE)); // remove consumed events
} else {
Sleep(5); // avoids too High a CPU usage when no input
}
return ch;
}
It is also possible to call ReadConsoleInput(GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE), &buf, 1, &len); rather than FlushConsoleInputBuffer(GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE)); in the code above, but for some unknown reason, it doesn't seem to reply/react as quickly and some character are missed when typing at the keyboard.