I want someone to type words in the console, and autocomplete from a list when they hit "tab" key. However, raw_input won't return a string until someone hits [Enter].
How do I read characters into a variable until the user hits [Enter]?
*Note: I don't want to use import readline for autocompletion because of OS issues.
There is an official FAQ entry on this question, for Unix: http://www.python.org/doc/faq/library/#how-do-i-get-a-single-keypress-at-a-time
Edit (copied from Donal Fellows' comment below): "The problem is that the terminal is in “cooked” mode by default (allowing simple line editing) and that to get the keys as they're typed, it has to be placed in “raw” mode." (Thanks!)
On *nix use select on sys.stdin to wait for a character, then .read() it in. On Windows use msvcrt.kbhit() and msvcrt.getch().
Related
I think this is perfectly valid.
if False:
print(1)
print(2)
However, it gives me an invalid syntax error in Python REPL.
Why is it?
On Python 3.6.5 (x64), Windows 10 RS4
As pointed out by user2357112, this behaviour is explained in https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/introduction.html#first-steps-towards-programming,
The body of the loop is indented: indentation is Python’s way of grouping statements. At the interactive prompt, you have to type a tab or space(s) for each indented line. In practice you will prepare more complicated input for Python with a text editor; all decent text editors have an auto-indent facility. When a compound statement is entered interactively, it must be followed by a blank line to indicate completion (since the parser cannot guess when you have typed the last line). Note that each line within a basic block must be indented by the same amount.
The REPL can only read and evaluate one statement at a time.
You entered two statements at once.
This is possible because the REPL cannot decide if the third line is going to continue the if construction or start a whole new statement. It has to assume the former to allow indented blocks at all.
You have to make it clear to the REPL that your previous statement is finished before starting a new one.
Wrong version seems to be the most possible since, in the error it shows print. In the older python versions, print was used as print"ok", I see your operating system is windows so you can just directly download python3 from https://python.org/ have a nice day!
I am working with pythons pexpect module to automate tasks, I need help in figuring out key characters to use with sendcontrol. how could one send the controlkey ENTER ? and for future reference how can we find the key characters?
here is the code i am working on.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import pexpect
id = pexpect.spawn ('ftp 192.168.3.140')
id.expect_exact('Name')
id.sendline ('anonymous')
id.expect_exact ('Password')
*# Not sure how to send the enter control key
id.sendcontrol ('???')*
id.expect_exact ('ftp')
id.sendline ('dir')
id.expect_exact ('ftp')
lines = id.before.split ('\n')
for line in lines :
print line
pexpect has no sendcontrol() method. In your example you appear to be trying to send an empty line. To do that, use:
id.sendline('')
If you need to send real control characters then you can send() a string that contains the appropriate character value. For instance, to send a control-C you would:
id.send('\003')
or:
id.send(chr(3))
Responses to comment #2:
Sorry, I typo'ed the module name -- now fixed. More importantly, I was looking at old documentation on noah.org instead of the latest documentation at SourceForge. The newer documentation does show a sendcontrol() method. It takes an argument that is either a letter (for instance, sendcontrol('c') sends a control-C) or one of a variety of punctuation characters representing the control characters that don't correspond to letters. But really sendcontrol() is just a convenient wrapper around the send() method, which is what sendcontrol() calls after after it has calculated the actual value that you want to send. You can read the source for yourself at line 973 of this file.
I don't understand why id.sendline('') does not work, especially given that it apparently works for sending the user name to the spawned ftp program. If you want to try using sendcontrol() instead then that would be either:
id.sendcontrol('j')
to send a Linefeed character (which is control-j, or decimal 10) or:
id.sendcontrol('m')
to send a Carriage Return (which is control-m, or decimal 13).
If those don't work then please explain exactly what does happen, and how that differs from what you wanted or expected to happen.
If you're just looking to "press enter", you can send a newline:
id.send("\n")
As for other characters that you might want to use sendcontrol() with, I found this useful: https://condor.depaul.edu/sjost/lsp121/documents/ascii-npr.htm
For instance, I was interested in Ctrl+v. Looking it up in the table shows this line:
control character
python & java
decimal
description
^v
\x16
22
synchronous idle
So if I want to send that character, I can do any of these:
id.send('\x16')
id.send(chr(22))
id.sendcontrol('v')
sendcontrol() just looks up the correct character to send and then sends it like any other text
For keys not listed in that table, you can run this script: https://github.com/pexpect/pexpect/blob/master/tests/getch.py (ctrl space to exit)
For instance, ran that script and pressed F4 and it said:
27<STOP>
79<STOP>
83<STOP>
So then to press F4 via pexpect:
id.send(chr(27) + chr(79) + chr(83))
If introduce a for loop in iPython, or any multi-line command, how do I go back and add lines to it? I ran this:
for row in table.find_all('tr'):
cells = row.find_all('td')
for c,cell in enumerate(cells):
print c,":",cell.get_text().strip()
try:
this = cells[0]
that = cells[1]
the_docket = cells[2]
other_thign = cells[3]
jumble = re.sub('\s+',' ',str(cells[5])).strip()
except:
"Nope"
And realized I need to add a line to it, but I can't just hit "enter" in iPython, b/c that runs the command. So can I edit that multi-line command w/in iPython?
Been suffering this problem for a while. I just found that when using Ctrl-qCtrl-j (That's lowercase Q, J, no need to hold the shift key) will add a linefeed to an existing IPython edit session.
for li in some_list: print(li)
Moving the cursor after the colon and pressing Ctrl-qCtrl-j
for li in some_list:
print(li)
IPython: 5.2.1, iTerm2: 3.0.15, macOS: 10.12.6
The %edit magic function in iPython lets you edit code in your favorite editor and will then execute it as if it was typed directly. You can also edit code you've already typed into the repl since it's stored in a special variable, for example:
In [1]: def foo(x):
...: print x
...:
In [2]: %edit _i1
There is also a way to add a newline directly in the repl: ctrl-v, ctrl-j
The ctrl-v basically lets you send a control code and then the ctrl-j is the code for a newline (line-feed). It's a bit awkward to type but has the advantage of also working in the regular Python shell as well as in Bash itself.
Edit: At least in iTerm2, you can assign it to a single hotkey as well. I set ctrl-enter to "Send hex codes" of 0x16 0x0a. Could also use cmd-enter or whatever else.
You can use ctrl+on (i.e. press the control button and enter the characters 'o', 'n' while holding it). You can also do it in two steps - ctrl+o ctrl+n but I find the former easier.
ctrl-o - enter the multiline mode
ctrl-n - access command history going forward.
But since there is no forward history, cursor just moves to the next line.
I verified that it works with both IPython 5.3.0 and IPython 7.3.0 on a machine running git bash 2.18.0 + windows 7.
A easy way of doing it is using the ;\ operator. ; to signal that its the end of a command and \ to indicate the the command follows in a new line as follows:
In[4]: password = "123";\
username = "alpha"
This will let you have multiple line commands in ipython without invoking the editor
For completeness: newer IPython versions (0.11+) have a very nice graphical console which allows you to navigate your code with the arrows and even reposition the cursor with the mouse.
In multi-line statements, some keys take on a special function (arrows to navigate, Enter to insert a line break and others). You'll have to position the cursor at the end of the last line of the statement in order to get default behaviour, e.g. get the Up arrow ↑ to mean "previous statement" instead of "move the cursor to the previous line". Or get Enter to mean "execute code" instead of "insert line break in the middle of code".
The documentation on it is a bit sparse and fragmented in different pages, so here are the essential three links for getting started with it:
Intro to the Qt Console
Configuring IPython using nice per-user profile files instead of command line arguments
You are interested in the ipython_qtconsole_config.py
How to get an ipython graphical console on Windows 7?
Type Ctrl+q then Enter. As other pointed out, Ctrl+q lets you send a character code, but hitting Ctrl+q then Enter may be more natural than Ctrl+q then Ctrl+j.
Another option is to type ( then Enter, write, and delete the ( afterwards. This solution is similar to the one where you to type ;\ to say the statement is not completed.
Bit late to the party! But I noticed many people are talking about using Ctrl combinations to add extra lines. This didn't work for me until I saw a comment about it being the Emacs binding. I have set my in line editor to be Vi, if you have too then pressing Esc to go into "Normal" mode on the line before you want to add an extra line then press o (or O if you are after the line). Just like in normal Vi(m). Works for me!
Some terminals will send ^? as backspace, some other terminals will send ^H.
Most of the terminals can be configured to change their behavior.
I do not want to deal with all the possible combinations but I would like to accept both ^? and ^H as a backspace from python.
doing this
os.system("stty erase '^?'")
I will accept the first option and with
os.system("stty erase '^H'")
I will accept the second one but the first will be no longer available.
I would like to use
raw_input("userinput>>")
to grab the input.
The only way I was able to figure out is implementing my own shell which works not on "raw based input" but on "char based input".
Any better (and quicker) idea?
The built-in function raw_input() (or input() in Python 3) will automatically use the readline library after importing it. This gives you a nice and full-feautured line editor, and it is probably your best bet on platforms where it is available, as long as you don't mind Readline having a contagious licence (GPL).
I don't know your question exactly. IMO, you need a method to read some line-based text(including some special character) from console to program.
No matter what method you use, if read this character have special mean in different console, you should confront a console(not only system-specific, but also console-specific) question, all text in console will be store in buffer first, and then show in screen, finally processed and send in to your program. Another way to surround this problem is to use a raw line-obtaining console environment.
You can add a special method(a decorator) to decorate the raw_input() or somewhat input method to process special word.
After solved that question
using this snippet can deal with input,:
def pre():
textline=raw_input()
# ^? should replace to the specific value.
textline.replace("^?","^H")
return textline
To be faster, maybe invoke some system function depend on OS is an idea. But in fact, IO in python is faster enough for common jobs.
To fix ^? on erase do stty erase ^H
I have this code in Python
inputted = input("Enter in something: ")
print("Input is {0}, including the return".format(inputted))
that outputs
Enter in something: something
Input is something
, including the return
I am not sure what is happening; if I use variables that don't depend on user input, I do not get the newline after formatting with the variable. I suspect Python might be taking in the newline as input when I hit return.
How can I make it so that the input does not include any newlines so that I may compare it to other strings/characters? (e.g. something == 'a')
You are correct - a newline is included in inputted. To remove it, you can just call strip("\r\n") to remove the newline from the end:
print("Input is {0}, including the return".format(inputted.strip("\r\n")))
This won't cause any issues if inputted does not have a newline at the end, but will remove any that are there, so you can use this whether inputted is user input or not.
If you don't want any newlines in the text at all, you can use inputted.replace("\r\n", "") to remove all newlines.
Your problem is actually Eclipse. Assuming that you use PyDev, I was able to reproduce the problem. When entering something in the Eclipse console, the problem occurs as described in your question. But when directly executing the very same script with the Python 3.1.1 interpreter, inputted does not include a newline character.
I investigated the Python source code and found out input() uses GNU readline if stdin is interactive (i.e. a TTY or prompt, however you want to call it), but falls back to the .readline() method of the stdin object if necessary. Then, if the result of readline ends with \n, that character is removed. Note: No CR-LF or LF-CR handling here (in the fallback case)!
So I wrote this little script to see what actually happens:
import sys
from io import StringIO
for stdin in [sys.stdin, StringIO("test\r\ntest\r\n")]:
sys.stdin = stdin
print("readline returns this: " + repr(sys.stdin.readline()))
inputted = input("Enter in something: ")
print("inputted: " + repr(inputted))
print("inputted is printed like this: --> {0} <--".format(inputted))
It first executes the code with the normal stdin (console or Eclipse console) and then with a prepared stdin containing the text test\r\ntest\r\n.
Try and run the script in Eclipse - you must enter a string twice. The conclusion: Pressing Enter in the Eclipse console will produce CR-LF ("\r\n"). Printing "\r" in the Eclipse console will jump to the next line.
On the other side, running it in the Windows console will produce the expected output: input() returns a string without a newline at the end because (I guess) GNU readline is used. With the prepared stdin StringIO("test\r\n"), the input() result is "test\r" as in Eclipse (although not printed as newline).
Hope this all makes sense... but what I still don't know is if that is expected behavior of Eclipse.
If you only want to stript the last line endings, you could use rstrip.
inputted.rstrip ("\r\n")
inputted = inputted.strip()
Edit: As noted, this will kill all whitespace at the start and end. A way to get rid of only the trailing newline is:
import re
inputted = re.sub("[\n\r]+$", "", inputted)