Ncurses/C how to clear (stdin?) buffer?

errigour · 01-25-2013, 05:38 AM

hey I have wgetch() in a loop and it works great accept when there is
five inputs. My loop will execute five times to receive all the input.
I was wondering if there is a way to clear the linux input buffer
right before my call to wgetch(); so that all the previous commands
while scrolling text to the screen are disregarded.

Like during a loop, if the user enters a key, When there prompted to enter a key it will act as though they entered one because if I am not mistaken the input was queued so i want to stop that temperarly and then restart that later.

kbp · 01-28-2013, 08:13 PM

This may or may not be helpful but I found the function below several years ago (can't remember exactly where) and used it quite happily in a toy app that was an attempt to write safe c:

Code:

/*
	flushes STDIN in a defined fashion rather than 'fflush(stdin)' which is undefined in the C standard
	N.B. only use after testing for excess chars, e.g
	if (count >= maxChars) { 
	flushSTDIN();
	}
	otherwise if the buffer is empty it will wait for input.
*/

void flushSTDIN() {

int c;
do { 
errno = 0;
c = getchar();

	if (errno) { 
		fprintf(stderr, "Error flushing standard input buffer: %s\n", strerror(errno)); 
	} 
}
while ((c != '\n') && (!feof(stdin)));

return; 
}