7. Input functions

7.1. getch() class of functions

These functions read a single character from the terminal. But there are several subtle facts to consider. For example if you don't use the function cbreak(), curses will not read your input characters contiguously but will begin read them only after a new line or an EOF is encountered. In order to avoid this, the cbreak() function must used so that characters are immediately available to your program. Another widely used function is noecho(). As the name suggests, when this function is set (used), the characters that are keyed in by the user will not show up on the screen. The two functions cbreak() and noecho() are typical examples of key management. Functions of this genre are explained in the key management section .

7.2. scanw() class of functions

These functions are similar to scanf() with the added capability of getting the input from any location on the screen.

7.3. getstr() class of functions

These functions are used to get strings from the terminal. In essence, this function performs the same task as would be achieved by a series of calls to getch() until a newline, carriage return, or end-of-file is received. The resulting string of characters are pointed to by str, which is a character pointer provided by the user.

7.4. Some examples

#include <ncurses.h>			/* ncurses.h includes stdio.h */  
#include <string.h> 
 
int main()
{
 char mesg[]="Enter a string: ";		/* message to be appeared on the screen */
 char str[80];
 int row,col;				/* to store the number of rows and *
					 * the number of colums of the screen */
 initscr();				/* start the curses mode */
 getmaxyx(stdscr,row,col);		/* get the number of rows and columns */
 mvprintw(row/2,(col-strlen(mesg))/2,"%s",mesg);
                     		/* print the message at the center of the screen */
 getstr(str);
 mvprintw(LINES - 2, 0, "You Entered: %s", str);
 getch();
 endwin();

 return 0;
}