Is there a way to either;
(1) Clear any input from the terminal
(2) take input without the input being saved to the terminal
For example, in this program I enter a string and it checks if any of the letters are the same. Ideally I would want the input string to be cleared so that the hashtags form a rectangle by the 5th guess. I am aware that clearing the entire terminal and reprinting all the rows is an option but I would much rather just clear the line of input after every guess (if this is possible).
You can use VT100 escape codes. Most terminals, including xterm, are VT100 aware. For erasing a line, this is ^[[2K. In C this gives:
printf("\33[2K\r");
Some worthwhile subtleties...
\33[2K erases the entire line your cursor is currently on
\033[A moves your cursor up one line, but in the same column i.e. not to the start of the line
\r brings your cursor to the beginning of the line (r is for carriage return N.B. carriage returns do not include a newline so cursor remains on the same line) but does not erase anything
I'm using the readline library in C to create a bash-like prompt within bash. When I tried to make the prompt colorful, with color sequences like these, the coloring works great, but the cursor spacing is messed up. The input is wrapped around too early and the wrap-around is to the same line so it starts overwriting the prompt. I thought I should escape the color-sequences with \[ and \] like
readline("\[\e[1;31m$\e[0m\] ")
But that prints the square brackets, and if I escape the backslashes it prints those too. How do I escape the color codes so the cursor still works?
The way to tell readline that a character sequence in a prompt string doesn't actually move the cursor when output to the screen is to surround it with the markers RL_PROMPT_START_IGNORE (currently, this is the character literal '\001' in readline's C header file) and RL_PROMPT_END_IGNORE (currently '\002').
And as #Joachim and #Alter said, use '\033' instead of '\e' for portability.
I found this question when looking to refine the GNU readline prompt in a bash script. Like readline in C code, \[ and \] aren't special but \001 and \002 will work when given literally via the special treatment bash affords quoted words of the form $'string'. I've been here before (and left unsatisfied due to not knowing to combine it with $'…'), so I figured I'd leave my explanation here now that I have a solution.
Using the data provided here, I was able to conclude this result:
C1=$'\001\033[1;34m\002' # blue - from \e[1;34m
C0=$'\001\033[0;0m\002' # reset - from \e[0;0m
while read -p "${C1}myshell>$C0 " -e command; do
echo "you said: $command"
done
This gives a blue prompt that says myshell> and has a trailing space, without colors for the actual command. Neither hitting Up nor entering a command that wraps to the next line will be confused by the non-printing characters.
As explained in the accepted answer, \001 (Start of Heading) and \002 (Start of Text) are the RL_PROMPT_START_IGNORE and RL_PROMPT_END_IGNORE markers, which tell bash and readline not to count anything between them for the purpose of painting the terminal. (Also found here: \033 is more reliable than \e and since I'm now using octal codes anyway, I might as well use one more.)
There seems to be quite the dearth of documentation on this; the best I could find was in perl's documentation for Term::ReadLine::Gnu, which says:
PROMPT may include some escape sequences. Use RL_PROMPT_START_IGNORE to begin a sequence of non-printing characters, and RL_PROMPT_END_IGNORE to end the sequence.
What is the meaning of the following control characters:
Carriage return
Line feed
Form feed
Carriage return means to return to the beginning of the current line without advancing downward. The name comes from a printer's carriage, as monitors were rare when the name was coined. This is commonly escaped as "\r", abbreviated CR, and has ASCII value 13 or 0xD.
Linefeed means to advance downward to the next line; however, it has been repurposed and renamed. Used as "newline", it terminates lines (commonly confused with separating lines). This is commonly escaped as "\n", abbreviated LF or NL, and has ASCII value 10 or 0xA. CRLF (but not CRNL) is used for the pair "\r\n".
Form feed means advance downward to the next "page". It was commonly used as page separators, but now is also used as section separators. Text editors can use this character when you "insert a page break". This is commonly escaped as "\f", abbreviated FF, and has ASCII value 12 or 0xC.
As control characters, they may be interpreted in various ways.
The most important interpretation is how these characters delimit lines. Lines end with NL on Unix (including OS X), CRLF on Windows, and CR on older Macs. Note the shift in meaning from LF to NL, for the exact same character, gives the differences between Windows and Unix, which is also why many Windows programs use CRLF to separate instead of terminate lines. Many text editors can read files in any of these three formats and convert between them, but not all utilities can.
Form feed is much less commonly used. As page separator, it can only come between lines or at the start or end of the file.
\r is carriage return and moves the cursor back like if i will do-
printf("stackoverflow\rnine")
ninekoverflow
means it has shifted the cursor to the beginning of "stackoverflow" and overwrites the starting four characters since "nine" is four character long.
\n is new line character which changes the line and takes the cursor to the beginning of a new line like-
printf("stackoverflow\nnine")
stackoverflow
nine
\f is form feed, its use has become obsolete but it is used for giving indentation like
printf("stackoverflow\fnine")
stackoverflow
nine
if i will write like-
printf("stackoverflow\fnine\fgreat")
stackoverflow
nine
great
In short:
Carriage return (\r or 0xD): To take control at starting on the same line.
Line feed (\n or 0xA): To Take control at starting on the next line.
Form feed (\f or 0xC): To take control at starting on the next page.
More details and more control characters can be found on the following page: Control character
Have a look at Wikipedia:
Systems based on ASCII or a compatible character set use either LF (Line feed, '\n', 0x0A, 10 in decimal) or CR (Carriage return, '\r', 0x0D, 13 in decimal) individually, or CR followed by LF (CR+LF, 0x0D 0x0A). These characters are based on printer commands: The line feed indicated that one line of paper should feed out of the printer, and a carriage return indicated that the printer carriage should return to the beginning of the current line.
\f is used for page break.
You cannot see any effect in the console. But when you use this character constant in your file then you can see the difference.
Other example is that if you can redirect your output to a file then you don't have to write a file or use file handling.
For ex:
Write this code in c++
void main()
{
clrscr();
cout<<"helloooooo" ;
cout<<"\f";
cout<<"hiiiii" ;
}
and when you compile this it generate an exe(for ex. abc.exe)
then you can redirect your output to a file using this:
abc > xyz.doc
then open the file xyz.doc you can see the actual page break between hellooo and hiiii....
On old paper-printer terminals, advancing to the next line involved two actions: moving the print head back to the beginning of the horizontal scan range (carriage return) and advancing the roll of paper being printed on (line feed).
Since we no longer use paper-printer terminals, those actions aren't really relevant anymore, but the characters used to signal them have stuck around in various incarnations.
Apart from above information, there is still an interesting history of LF (\n) and CR (\r).
[Original author : 阮一峰 Source : http://www.ruanyifeng.com/blog/2006/04/post_213.html]
Before computer came out, there was a type of teleprinter called Teletype Model 33. It can print 10 characters each second. But there is one problem with this, after finishing printing each line, it will take 0.2 second to move to next line, which is time of printing 2 characters. If a new characters is transferred during this 0.2 second, then this new character will be lost.
So scientists found a way to solve this problem, they add two ending characters after each line, one is 'Carriage return', which is to tell the printer to bring the print head to the left.; the other one is 'Line feed', it tells the printer to move the paper up 1 line.
Later, computer became popular, these two concepts are used on computers. At that time, the storage device was very expensive, so some scientists said that it was expensive to add two characters at the end of each line, one is enough, so there are some arguments about which one to use.
In UNIX/Mac and Linux, '\n' is put at the end of each line, in Windows, '\r\n' is put at the end of each line. The consequence of this use is that files in UNIX/Mac will be displayed in one line if opened in Windows. While file in Windows will have one ^M at the end of each line if opened in UNIX or Mac.
Consider an IBM 1403 impact printer. CR moved the print head to the start of the line, but did NOT advance the paper. This allowed for "overprinting", placing multiple lines of output on one line. Things like underlining were achieved this way, as was BOLD print. LF advanced the paper one line. If there was no CR, the next line would print as a staggered-step because LF didn't move the print head. FF advanced the paper to the next page. It typically also moved the print head to the start of the first line on the new page, but you might need CR for that. To be sure, most programmers coded CRFF instead of CRLF at the end of the last line on a page because an extra CR created by FF wouldn't matter.
As a supplement,
1, Carriage return: It's a printer terminology meaning changing the print location to the beginning of current line. In computer world, it means return to the beginning of current line in most cases but stands for new line rarely.
2, Line feed: It's a printer terminology meaning advancing the paper one line. So Carriage return and Line feed are used together to start to print at the beginning of a new line. In computer world, it generally has the same meaning as newline.
3, Form feed: It's a printer terminology, I like the explanation in this thread.
If you were programming for a 1980s-style printer, it would eject the
paper and start a new page. You are virtually certain to never need
it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_feed
It's almost obsolete and you can refer to Escape sequence \f - form feed - what exactly is it? for detailed explanation.
Note, we can use CR or LF or CRLF to stand for newline in some platforms but newline can't be stood by them in some other platforms. Refer to wiki Newline for details.
LF: Multics, Unix and Unix-like systems (Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, AIX,
Xenix, etc.), BeOS, Amiga, RISC OS, and others
CR: Commodore 8-bit machines, Acorn BBC, ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, Apple
II family, Oberon, the classic Mac OS up to version 9, MIT Lisp
Machine and OS-9
RS: QNX pre-POSIX implementation
0x9B: Atari 8-bit machines using ATASCII variant of ASCII (155 in
decimal)
CR+LF: Microsoft Windows, DOS (MS-DOS, PC DOS, etc.), DEC TOPS-10,
RT-11, CP/M, MP/M, Atari TOS, OS/2, Symbian OS, Palm OS, Amstrad CPC,
and most other early non-Unix and non-IBM OSes
LF+CR: Acorn BBC and RISC OS spooled text output.
"\n" is the linefeed character. It means end the present line and go to a new line for anyone who is reading it.
Carriage return and line feed are also references to typewriters, in that the with a small push on the handle on the left side of the carriage (the place where the paper goes), the paper would rotate a small amount around the cylinder, advancing the document one line. If you had finished typing one line, and wanted to continue on to the next, you pushed harder, both advancing a line and sliding the carriage all the way to the right, then resuming typing left to right again as the carriage traveled with each keystroke. Needless to say, word-wrap was the default setting for all word processing of the era. P:D
Those are non-printing characters, relating to the concept of "new line". \n is linefeed. \r is carriage return. On different platforms they have different meanings, relative to a valid new line. In windows, a new line is \r\n. In linux, \n. In mac, \r.
In practice, you put them in any string, and it will have effect on the print-out of the string.
when I was an apprentice in the Royal Signals many (50) years ago, teletypes and typewriters had "Carriage" with the printing head on them. When you pressed RETURN the Carriage would fly to the left. Hence Carriage Return (CR). You could just return the Carriage, but on mechanical typewriters, you'd use the Lever (much like a tremolo lever on an electric guitar) which would also do the Line Feed. Your next question is why would you not want the line feed? heh heh well in those days to delete characters we'd do a CR then use a Tip-ex-like paper in between the hammerheads and paper and type the same keys to over-write with white ink. Some fancy typewriters had a key you could press. So there you go.
Some applications running in terminal can erase their outputs. e.g.
when it tells you to wait, it will show a sequence of dots alternating between different lengths.
How is erasing output in terminal implemented in C? Is it done by reverse line feed?
Can a program only erase the previous characters in the current line, not the characters in the previous line in stdout?
Thanks.
It depends on the terminal.
The COMSPEC shell on Windows (often called the DOS prompt or command.com) exposes an API in C to control the cursor. I haven't done any Windows programming so I can't tell you much about it.
Most other terminals (especially on unixen) emulate protocols that resemble the VT100 serial terminal (the VT100 terminal was a physical device, a monitor and keyboard, that you attached to a modem or serial port to communicate with a server).
On VT100 terminals, carriage return and line feed are separate commands, both one byte. The carriage return command sets the cursor to the beginning of the line. The line feed command moves the cursor down a line (but doesn't bring the cursor to the beginning of the line by itself). Most shells on unixen automatically insert a carriage return after a line feed but almost none inserts a line feed after a carriage return.
With this knowledge, the simplest implementation is to simply output a carriage return and reprint the entire line:
printf("\rprogress: %d percent ", x);
Note the extra spaces at the end of the line. Printing "\r" doesn't erase the line so reprinting over the old line may end up leaving some of the old string on screen. The extra spaces is used to try and erase the remainder of the old line.
If you googled "VT100 escape secquence", you'll find commands that will allow you to do things like erase the current line, change color of text, goto a specific row/column on screen etc. The most popular use of VT100 sequences is to output coloured text. But you can also do other things with them.
The next simplest implementation is to cleanly delete the line and reprint it:
printf("\033[2K\rprogress: %d percent", x);
The \033[2K is the escape sequence to delete the current line (ESC[2K).
From here you can get more creative if you want. You can use the cursor save/restore command with the erase until end of line command to only erase the part you want to update (instead of the entire line). You can use the goto commands to put the cursor in a specific location on screen to update text there etc.
It should be noted that the more advanced stuff such as VT102 sequences or some of the full ANSI escape sequences are generally not portable accross terminals (by terminals I don't mean the shell, I mean the terminals: rxvt, xterm, linux terminal, hyperterminal(on windows) etc).
If you want portability (and/or sane API) you should use the curses or ncurses libraries.
If you wanted to know how it's done, then that's how it's done. It's just printing specially formatted strings to screen (except for the COMSPEC shell). Kind of like HTML but old-school.
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
int countch=0;
int countwd=1;
printf("Enter your sentence in lowercase: ");
char ch='a';
while(ch!='\r')
{
ch=getche();
if(ch==' ')
countwd++;
else
countch++;
}
printf("\n Words =%d ",countwd);
printf("Characters = %d",countch-1);
getch();
}
This is the program where I came across \r. What exactly is its role here? I am beginner in C and I appreciate a clear explanation on this.
'\r' is the carriage return character. The main times it would be useful are:
When reading text in binary mode, or which may come from a foreign OS, you'll find (and probably want to discard) it due to CR/LF line-endings from Windows-format text files.
When writing to an interactive terminal on stdout or stderr, '\r' can be used to move the cursor back to the beginning of the line, to overwrite it with new contents. This makes a nice primitive progress indicator.
The example code in your post is definitely a wrong way to use '\r'. It assumes a carriage return will precede the newline character at the end of a line entered, which is non-portable and only true on Windows. Instead the code should look for '\n' (newline), and discard any carriage return it finds before the newline. Or, it could use text mode and have the C library handle the translation (but text mode is ugly and probably should not be used).
It's Carriage Return. Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6aw8xdf2(v=vs.80).aspx
The following repeats the loop until the user has pressed the Return key.
while(ch!='\r')
{
ch=getche();
}
Once upon a time, people had terminals like typewriters (with only upper-case letters, but that's another story). Search for 'Teletype', and how do you think tty got used for 'terminal device'?
Those devices had two separate motions. The carriage return moved the print head back to the start of the line without scrolling the paper; the line feed character moved the paper up a line without moving the print head back to the beginning of the line. So, on those devices, you needed two control characters to get the print head back to the start of the next line: a carriage return and a line feed. Because this was mechanical, it took time, so you had to pause for long enough before sending more characters to the terminal after sending the CR and LF characters. One use for CR without LF was to do 'bold' by overstriking the characters on the line. You'd write the line out once, then use CR to start over and print twice over the characters that needed to be bold. You could also, of course, type X's over stuff that you wanted partially hidden, or create very dense ASCII art pictures with judicious overstriking.
On Unix, all the logic for this stuff was hidden in a terminal driver. You could use the stty command and the underlying functions (in those days, ioctl() calls; they were sanitized into the termios interface by POSIX.1 in 1988) to tweak all sorts of ways that the terminal behaved.
Eventually, you got 'glass terminals' where the speeds were greater and and there were new idiosyncrasies to deal with - Hazeltine glitches and so on and so forth. These got enshrined in the termcap and later terminfo libraries, and then further encapsulated behind the curses library.
However, some other (non-Unix) systems did not hide things as well, and you had to deal with CRLF in your text files - and no, this is not just Windows and DOS that were in the 'CRLF' camp.
Anyway, on some systems, the C library has to deal with text files that contain CRLF line endings and presents those to you as if there were only a newline at the end of the line. However, if you choose to treat the text file as a binary file, you will see the CR characters as well as the LF.
Systems like the old Mac OS (version 9 or earlier) used just CR (aka \r) for the line ending. Systems like DOS and Windows (and, I believe, many of the DEC systems such as VMS and RSTS) used CRLF for the line ending. Many of the Internet standards (such as mail) mandate CRLF line endings. And Unix has always used just LF (aka NL or newline, hence \n) for its line endings. And most people, most of the time, manage to ignore CR.
Your code is rather funky in looking for \r. On a system compliant with the C standard, you won't see the CR unless the file is opened in binary mode; the CRLF or CR will be mapped to NL by the C runtime library.
There are a few characters which can indicate a new line. The usual ones are these two:
'\n' or '0x0A' (10 in decimal) -> This character is called "Line Feed" (LF).
'\r' or '0x0D' (13 in decimal) -> This one is called "Carriage return" (CR).
Different Operating Systems handle newlines in a different way. Here is a short list of the most common ones:
DOS and Windows
They expect a newline to be the combination of two characters, namely '\r\n' (or 13 followed by 10).
Unix (and hence Linux as well)
Unix uses a single '\n' to indicate a new line.
Mac
Macs use a single '\r'.
That is not always true; it only works in Windows.
For interacting with terminal in putty, Linux shell,... it will be used for returning the cursor to the beginning of line.
following picture shows the usage of that:
Without '\r':
Data comes without '\r' to the putty terminal, it has just '\n'.
it means that data will be printed just in next line.
With '\r':
Data comes with '\r', i.e. string ends with '\r\n'. So the cursor in putty terminal not only will go to the next line but also at the beginning of line
It depends upon which platform you're on as to how it will be translated and whether it will be there at all: Wikipedia entry on newline
\r is an escape sequence character or void character. It is used to bring the cursor to the beginning of the line (it maybe of same or new line) to overwrite with new content (content written ahead of \r like: \rhello);
int main ()
{
printf("Hello \rworld");
return 0;
}
The output of the program will be world not Hello world
because \r has put the cursor at the beginning of the line and Hello has been overwritten with world.