How do I read a single character from stdin synchronously?

Question

Put in another way, what is the node.js equivalent of C's getchar function? (which waits for input and when it gets it, it returns the character code of the letter, and subsequent calls get more characters from stdin)

I tried searching google, but none of the answers were synchronous.

Answer 1

Here is a simple implementation of getChar based fs.readSync:

fs.readSync(fd, buffer, offset, length)

Unlike the other answer, this will be synchronous, only read one char from the stdin and be blocking, just like the C's getchar:

let fs = require('fs')

function getChar() {
  let buffer = Buffer.alloc(1)
  fs.readSync(0, buffer, 0, 1)
  return buffer.toString('utf8')
}

console.log(getChar())
console.log(getChar())
console.log(getChar())