Polling the keyboard (detect a keypress) in python

Question

How can I poll the keyboard from a console python app? Specifically, I would like to do something akin to this in the midst of a lot of other I/O activities (socket selects, serial port access, etc.):

   while 1:
      # doing amazing pythonic embedded stuff
      # ...

      # periodically do a non-blocking check to see if
      # we are being told to do something else
      x = keyboard.read(1000, timeout = 0)

      if len(x):
          # ok, some key got pressed
          # do something

What is the correct pythonic way to do this on Windows? Also, portability to Linux wouldn't be bad, though it's not required.

Answer 1

The standard approach is to use the select module.

However, this doesn't work on Windows. For that, you can use the msvcrt module's keyboard polling.

Often, this is done with multiple threads -- one per device being "watched" plus the background processes that might need to be interrupted by the device.

Answer 2

import sys
import select

def heardEnter():
    i,o,e = select.select([sys.stdin],[],[],0.0001)
    for s in i:
        if s == sys.stdin:
            input = sys.stdin.readline()
            return True
    return False

Answer 3

A solution using the curses module. Printing a numeric value corresponding to each key pressed:

import curses

def main(stdscr):
    # do not wait for input when calling getch
    stdscr.nodelay(1)
    while True:
        # get keyboard input, returns -1 if none available
        c = stdscr.getch()
        if c != -1:
            # print numeric value
            stdscr.addstr(str(c) + ' ')
            stdscr.refresh()
            # return curser to start position
            stdscr.move(0, 0)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    curses.wrapper(main)

Answer 4

Ok, since my attempt to post my solution in a comment failed, here's what I was trying to say. I could do exactly what I wanted from native Python (on Windows, not anywhere else though) with the following code:

import msvcrt 

def kbfunc(): 
   x = msvcrt.kbhit()
   if x: 
      ret = ord(msvcrt.getch()) 
   else: 
      ret = 0 
   return ret

Answer 5

None of these answers worked well for me. This package, pynput, does exactly what I need.

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pynput

from pynput.keyboard import Key, Listener

def on_press(key):
    print('{0} pressed'.format(
        key))

def on_release(key):
    print('{0} release'.format(
        key))
    if key == Key.esc:
        # Stop listener
        return False

# Collect events until released
with Listener(
        on_press=on_press,
        on_release=on_release) as listener:
    listener.join()

Answer 6

You might look at how pygame handles this to steal some ideas.

Answer 7

From the comments:

import msvcrt # built-in module

def kbfunc():
    return ord(msvcrt.getch()) if msvcrt.kbhit() else 0

---

Thanks for the help. I ended up writing a C DLL called PyKeyboardAccess.dll and accessing the crt conio functions, exporting this routine:

#include <conio.h>

int kb_inkey () {
   int rc;
   int key;

   key = _kbhit();

   if (key == 0) {
      rc = 0;
   } else {
      rc = _getch();
   }

   return rc;
}

And I access it in python using the ctypes module (built into python 2.5):

import ctypes
import time

#
# first, load the DLL
#


try:
    kblib = ctypes.CDLL("PyKeyboardAccess.dll")
except:
    raise ("Error Loading PyKeyboardAccess.dll")


#
# now, find our function
#

try:
    kbfunc = kblib.kb_inkey
except:
    raise ("Could not find the kb_inkey function in the dll!")


#
# Ok, now let's demo the capability
#

while 1:
    x = kbfunc()

    if x != 0:
        print "Got key: %d" % x
    else:
        time.sleep(.01)

Answer 8

I am using this for checking for key presses, can't get much simpler:

#!/usr/bin/python3
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-

import curses, time

def main(stdscr):
    """checking for keypress"""
    stdscr.nodelay(True)  # do not wait for input when calling getch
    return stdscr.getch()

while True:
    print("key:", curses.wrapper(main)) # prints: 'key: 97' for 'a' pressed
                                        # '-1' on no presses
    time.sleep(1)

While curses is not working on windows, there is a 'unicurses' version, supposedly working on Linux, Windows, Mac but I could not get this to work

Answer 9

I've come across a cross-platform implementation of kbhit at http://home.wlu.edu/~levys/software/kbhit.py (made edits to remove irrelevant code):

import os
if os.name == 'nt':
    import msvcrt
else:
    import sys, select

def kbhit():
    ''' Returns True if a keypress is waiting to be read in stdin, False otherwise.
    '''
    if os.name == 'nt':
        return msvcrt.kbhit()
    else:
        dr,dw,de = select.select([sys.stdin], [], [], 0)
        return dr != []

Make sure to read() the waiting character(s) -- the function will keep returning True until you do!

Answer 10

If you combine time.sleep, threading.Thread, and sys.stdin.read you can easily wait for a specified amount of time for input and then continue, also this should be cross-platform compatible.

t = threading.Thread(target=sys.stdin.read(1) args=(1,))
t.start()
time.sleep(5)
t.join()

You could also place this into a function like so

def timed_getch(self, bytes=1, timeout=1):
    t = threading.Thread(target=sys.stdin.read, args=(bytes,))
    t.start()
    time.sleep(timeout)
    t.join()
    del t

Although this will not return anything so instead you should use the multiprocessing pool module you can find that here: how to get the return value from a thread in python?