Multi-line input problems when using STDIN.gets - ruby

Having looked at this question, I have the following code:
$/ = "\0"
answer = STDIN.gets
Now, I was hoping that this would allow the user to:
enter a multi-line input, terminating by pressing Ctrl-D.
enter a single line input, terminating by pressing Ctrl-D.
enter a "nothing" input, terminating by pressing Ctrl-D.
However, the behaviour I actually see is that:
The user can enter a multi-line input fine.
The user can not enter a single line input, unless they hit Ctrl-D twice.
The user can enter a "nothing" input if they hit Ctrl-D straight away.
So, why does the single line situation (i.e. if the user has entered some text but no newline and then hit Ctrl-D) require two presses of Ctrl-D? And why does it work then if the user enters nothing? (I have noted that if they enter nothing and hit Ctrl-D, I don't get an empty string but the nil class - I discovered this when trying to call .empty? on the result, since it suddenly failed horribly. If there is a way to get it to return an empty string as well, that would be nice. I prefer checking .empty? to ==, and don't particularly want to define .empty? for the nil class.)
EDIT: Since I really would like to know the "correct way" to do this in Ruby, I am offering a bounty of 200 rep. I will also accept answers that give another way of entering terminal multi-line input with a sensible "submit" procedure - I will be the judge of 'suitable'. For example, we're currently using two "\n"s, but that's not suitable, as it blocks paragraphs and is unintuitive.

The basic problem is the terminal itself. See many of the related links to the right of your post. To get around this you need to put the terminal in a raw state. The following worked for me on a Solaris machine:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# store the old stty settings
old_stty = `stty -g`
# Set up the terminal in non-canonical mode input processing
# This causes the terminal to process one character at a time
system "stty -icanon min 1 time 0 -isig"
answer = ""
while true
char = STDIN.getc
break if char == ?\C-d # break on Ctrl-d
answer += char.chr
end
system "stty #{old_stty}" # restore stty settings
answer
I'm not sure if the storing and restoring of the stty settings is necessary but I've seen other people do it.

When reading STDIN from a terminal device you are working in a slightly different mode to reading STDIN from a file or a pipe.
When reading from a tty Control-D (EOF) only really sends EOF if the input buffer is empty. If it is not empty it returns data to the read system call but does not send EOF.
The solution is to use some lower level IO and read a character at a time. The following code (or somethings similar) will do what you want
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
answer = ""
while true
begin
input = STDIN.sysread(1)
answer += input
rescue EOFError
break
end
end
puts "|#{answer.class}|#{answer}|"
The results of running this code with various inputs are as follows :-
INPUT This is a line<CR><Ctrl-D>
|String|This is a line
|
INPUT This is a line<Ctrl-D>
|String|This is a line|
INPUT<Ctrl-D>
|String||

Related

How do I remove the 'Done' message after my program has executed?

I made a program that is similar to clearing RAM. However, it always leaves a "Done" message followed by a dotted line after being executed. In addition, if you scroll up, you can see that the program was executed. Is there a way to remove both of these things? If you can't hide the fact that a program was executed, could you suppress the 'Done' message?
I have tried adding ClearHome" and " as the last line of my program, and neither stops the Done message from displaying.
Bonus points if your solution can be contained within the original program.
In a separate program, type the following line of code:
AsmPrgmFDCB00AEC9
Then at the end of the original program, type the following line of code:
Asm(prgmPROGRAMNAME
It is recommended that you test this out first with all programs archived, just running the above line of code alone, in case it fails. Hex codes like that one have been known to fail, and sometimes clears the RAM.
You can also try these other hex codes, but always keep in mind the warning above. My RAM has been cleared by this before, so use caution:
http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com/hexcodes
This works on TI 83 and 84, may be different with other calculator types.
EDIT:
I found a way to do this without an external program, and is much simpler.
Just add the following line of code to the end of your program:
Output(1,1," //no space, just a quote
You may or may not have to add ClrHome before that line of code.
This should prevent the Done message from appearing at the end.
Hope this helps!
Put an empty string at the end of your program, so your last line looks like this:
""
Or this
"
The empty string is stored to ans and will be displayed as a blank line rather than the Done message.
There is also an assembly hexcode to do this without leaving the blank line at the top:
FDCB00AEC9
When run at the end of the program using one of the various methods of running assembly, it will leave you with a blank, fully operational homescreen.
Outputting an empty string will prevent the Done message and also preserve Ans, in case a calling program is expecting to use it.
Output(Y,X,"")
See http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com/output for more details on Output(.
In your situation, run Clear Entries (found under Mem), then scroll up so that the Done message is selected and press Clear to get rid of it.

Gets stops processing script if it encounters a apostrophe

I'm futzing with a lesson over on Codecademy, pretty basic but the lesson prompts the user for a string and then prompts them for words to hide from the string. I've already finished with the lesson but I wanted to try messing with it outside of the lesson.
What I'm finding is the following script will run to completion in the lesson's scripting and interpreter area but if I try to run the same script over at say labs.codecademy.com or repl.it
I'll get prompted for the first question and if I enter a string containing an apostrophe it won't go on to the next prompt. I'm not getting an error, but eventually I'll get a "This program is taking too long to finish" pop up.
Here's the script:
puts "Tell me something."
text = gets.chomp
puts "What would you like me to forget?"
redact = gets.chomp
words = text.split(" ")
words.each { |text|
if redact.include? text
print "REDACTED "
else
print text + " "
end
}
So for example if you were to enter I really like blueberry pie that passes, but if you were to enter They've told me I should try the blueberry pie the program gets hung up.
I'm a complete novice when it comes to Ruby, but is there a way to have gets process that sort of punctuation? Or is that not the right way to go about it? Or is it just the environment I'm trying to run this program in?
IO.gets is a system-level call: http://apidock.com/ruby/IO/gets
it well read from STDIN (standard input) which is the text that you type in a terminal window: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_streams
browsers per-se don't have this and it might depend on the implementation of the web-based console about how they handle calls like that. usually, there are known limitations (like this one).
as #BroiStatse pointed out, it might as well be a bug in in their browser-based implementation.

What is the best way to get keyboard events (input without press 'enter') in a Ruby console application?

I've been looking for this answer in the internet for a while and have found other people asking the same thing, even here. So this post will be a presentation of my case and a response to the "solutions" that I have found.
I am such new in Ruby, but for learning purposes I decided to create a gem, here.
I am trying to implement a keyboard navigation to this program, that will allow the user use short-cuts to select what kind of request he want to see. And in the future, arrow navigations, etc.
My problem: I can't find a consistent way to get the keyboard events from the user's console with Ruby.
Solutions that I have tried:
Highline gem: Seems do not support this feature anymore. Anyway it uses the STDIN, keep reading.
STDIN.getch: I need to run it in a parallel loop, because at the same time that the user can use a short-cut, more data can be created and the program needs to show it. And well, I display formated text in the console, (Rails log). When this loop is running, my text lost the all the format.
Curses: Cool but I need to set position(x,y) to display my text every time? It will get confusing.
Here is where I am trying to do it.
You may note that I am using "stty -raw echo" (turns raw off) before show my text and "stty raw -echo" (turns raw on) after. That keeps my text formated.
But my key listener loop is not working. I mean, It works in sometimes but is not consistent. If a press a key twice it don't work anymore and sometimes it stops alone too.
Let me put one part of the code here:
def run
# Two loops run in parallel using Threads.
# stream_log loops like a normal stream in the file, but it also parser the text.
# break it into requests and store in #requests_queue.
# stream_parsed_log stream inside the #requests_queue and shows it in the screen.
#requests_queue = Queue.new
#all_requests = Array.new
# It's not working yet.
Thread.new { listen_keyboard }
Thread.new { stream_log }
stream_parsed_log
end
def listen_keyboard
# not finished
loop do
char = STDIN.getch
case char
when 'q'
puts "Exiting."
exit
when 'a'
#types_to_show = ['GET', 'POST', 'PUT', 'DELETE', 'ASSET']
requests_to_show = filter_to_show(#all_requests)
command = true
when 'p'
#types_to_show = ['POST']
requests_to_show = filter_to_show(#all_requests)
command = true
end
clear_screen if command
#requests_queue += requests_to_show if command
command = false
end
end
I need a light in my path, what should I do?
That one was my mistake.
It's just a logic error in another part of code that was running in another thread so the ruby don't shows the error by default. I used ruby -d and realized what was wrong. This mistake was messing my keyboard input.
So now it's fixed and I am using STDIN.getch with no problem.
I just turn the raw mode off before show any string. And everything is ok.
You can check here, or in the gem itself.
That's it.

STDIN.getch as a non block event (it's possible?)

I'm trying to read a character instantly from command line without use of Enter. The ruby (ruby 1.9.3p374) code that I'm using is the following:
require 'io/console'
ch = STDIN.getch
puts ch
until now everithing is working fine but now i want to put this code inside an infinite loop doing some other stuff, something like
loop do
puts "..doing stuff.."
ch = STDIN.getch
if ch == 'q'
break
end
end
but this code always force that we press a key between each printing. I want a behaviour similar to STDIN.read_nonblock method but without having to press enter key after pressing one char.
Basically I want to print "..doing stuff.." until I press a certain key on keyboard but i don't want to use enter.
Any help will be appreciated. Thanks
You could always use the built-in curses library to handle your interaction. It's very powerful and is used to construct keyboard-driven tools such as text editors.
The alternative is to use select to poll if STDIN is readable. Your terminal might be in a line-buffered state, so you'd need to adjust that before single keystrokes are received. This is something that Curses can handle for you.

Reading user input without halting execution

I'm trying to read user input in a console interface in a Lua application.
However, I do not want to halt program execution as the title suggests. Using read() would interfere with the normal handling of ongoing events, and interface updates, while the user's typing.
The best solution I could come up with was maintaining a temporary variable I apply any user input to that isn't a function key. However, my event handler returns scancodes, and I know of no way to map these to ASCII codes short of maintaining a table for each key, which is something I really want to avoid.
Any ideas?
Edit
To give an example of what I mean:
function read_input()
local input = read()
do_something_with(input)
end
while true do
e,param1,param2,param3 = os.pullEvent()
if (e=='key' and param1=='201') then
read_input()
elseif (e=='something_else') then
do_something_else()
end
end
As you can see, the user can at some point land in a function demanding user input. While this input is taken, I can't have any other (event-based) functions of the program being impeded by this.
You would need to read the keys continuously from the os.pullEvent()
local input
while true do
e,param1,param2,param3 = os.pullEvent()
if (e=='key') then
-- do some fancy stuff for checking which key has pressed and append it to input
-- additionally if it's enter do something other fancy
else
-- blah blah
end
end
I'm not sure but I thought the character of which key was pressed is in one of the params of the pullEvent, I might be mistaken tho.
Additionally if you want to do something every second or so, start a timer which also fires the pullEvent.

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