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Stdin takes in values from before my code even starts. How do I prevent this? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago by Binette@lemmy.ml to c/rust@lemmy.ml

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For context, I am using the libraries bevy and print_typewriter.

I noticed that before the program even starts, I am able to type in characters. This is bad, since when I ask for the user's input, the previous characters are included inside of it.

How do I make sure that only the user's input after the program starts, and after I print a question gets in?

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[–] ssokolow@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

What you're running into is that read() does blocking I/O by default and, while you can change that, both approaches (checking for pending data before reading or setting stdin into non-blocking mode so it'll return immediately either way) require different code for Windows and for POSIX, so it's best to let your platform abstraction (i.e. termwiz) handle that.

I have no experience with Bevy or Termwiz, but see if this does what you want once you've fixed any "I wrote this but never tried to compile it" bugs:

use std::time::Duration;

fn flush_stdin(main_terminal: terminal::SystemTerminal) {
    while let Ok(Some(_)) = main_terminal.poll_input(Some(Duration::ZERO)) { }
}

If I've understood the termwiz docs correctly, that'll pull and discard keypresses off the input buffer until none are left and then return.

Note that I'm not sure how it'll behave if you call enter_name a second time and you're still in cooked mode from a previous enter_name. My experience is with raw mode. (And it's generally bad form to have a function change global state as a hidden side-effect and not restore what it was before.)

[–] Binette@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Thanks a lot man! After debuggin for a while it worked!

I was also wondering, where do you learn that kind of stuff? I'm currently learning and would like to be as resourceful as possible.

[–] ssokolow@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I'm sure other people have a more teachable way of learning these things but I'm just one of those nerdy guys who's been reading technical materials for pleasure since he was in elementary school and gathered the core "this will tell you how the system is designed so you know what to ask about" knowledge along the way.

For example, I just ran across The TTY Demystified, Things Every Hacker Once Knew, The Art of UNIX Programming, and A Digital Media Primer for Geeks on my own. (Sort of the more general version of "It showed up in the YouTube sidebar one day" or "I landed on it while wandering Wikipedia for fun".)

Beyond that, it's mostly "exposing yourself to things the professionals experience", like running a Linux distro like Archlinux or Gentoo Linux which expect you to tinker under the hood and give you documentation to do so, maybe working through LinuxFromScratch to get exposed to how the pieces of Linux fit together, reading periodicals like LWN (articles become un-paywalled after a week, if you're tight on money or need time to convince yourself it's worthwhile), and watching conference talks on YouTube like code::dive conference 2014 - Scott Meyers: Cpu Caches and Why You Care or "NTFS really isn't that bad" - Robert Collins (LCA 2020).

(I switched to Linux permanently while I was still in high school, several years before YouTube even existed, and I'm only getting back into Windows now that I'm buying used books to start learning hobby-coding for MS-DOS beyond QBasic 1.1, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 beyond Visual Basic 6, and classic Mac OS, so I haven't really picked up much deep knowledge for Windows.)

The best I can suggest for directed learning is to read up on how the relevant system (eg. the terminal, UNIX I/O) works until you start to get a sense for which are the right questions to ask.