Reading a single char in Java

Question

How can a char be entered in Java from keyboard?

Answer 1

You can either scan an entire line:

Scanner s = new Scanner(System.in);
String str = s.nextLine();

Or you can read a single char, given you know what encoding you're dealing with:

char c = (char) System.in.read();

Answer 2

You can use Scanner like so:

Scanner s= new Scanner(System.in);
char x = s.next().charAt(0);

By using the charAt function you are able to get the value of the first char without using external casting.

Answer 3

Using nextline and System.in.read as often proposed requires the user to hit enter after typing a character. However, people searching for an answer to this question, may also be interested in directly respond to a key press in a console!

I found a solution to do so using jline3, wherein we first change the terminal into rawmode to directly respond to keys, and then wait for the next entered character:

var terminal = TerminalBuilder.terminal()
terminal.enterRawMode()
var reader = terminal.reader()

var c = reader.read()

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.jline</groupId>
    <artifactId>jline</artifactId>
    <version>3.12.3</version>
</dependency>

Answer 4

You can use a Scanner for this. It's not clear what your exact requirements are, but here's an example that should be illustrative:

    Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in).useDelimiter("\\s*");
    while (!sc.hasNext("z")) {
        char ch = sc.next().charAt(0);
        System.out.print("[" + ch + "] ");
    }

If you give this input:

123 a b c x   y   z

The output is:

[1] [2] [3] [a] [b] [c] [x] [y] 

So what happens here is that the Scanner uses \s* as delimiter, which is the regex for "zero or more whitespace characters". This skips spaces etc in the input, so you only get non-whitespace characters, one at a time.

Answer 5

i found this way worked nice:

    {
    char [] a;
    String temp;
    Scanner keyboard = new Scanner(System.in);
    System.out.println("please give the first integer :");
    temp=keyboard.next();
    a=temp.toCharArray();
    }

you can also get individual one with String.charAt()