I'm writing a program in Python that presents a place for the user to input one-line of text (using raw_input).

I need, however, as the user types, for certain words to be replaced, even before the user hits enter.

I try to make an animation so you can see what I mean, here the word "pig" gets replaced with "sheep":

>I|
>I |
>I l|
>I li|
>I lik|
>I like|
>I like |
>I like t|
>I like to|
>I like to |
>I like to e|
>I like to ea|
>I like to eat|
>I like to eat |
>I like to eat p|
>I like to eat pi|
>I like to eat pig|
>I like to eat sheep|

Note, the user never typed "sheep", the program replaced "pig" with "sheep" as soon as they finished typing the word "pig". The user did not use "Enter".

Is this at all possible in Python?

It should be trivial to write a program like that in python, but most likely, if you run it on a terminal, the input will be buffered: your program will only get the input after the user hits enter. You could try looking at "man termios(3)" I think icanon is the option that needs to be turned off.

The man page is a bit over my head. Is this something that changes the behavior of the terminal for all applications or something that I can run from within python? I only need this behavior in my single application.

Would this be easier to impliment if I moved to something like ncurses? The entire rest of the application is just menus where I just type a number and hit enter to make a selection.

OK, I found out that Python has two libraries for dealing with terminal control: tty and termios. termios is similar to the C library function. tty is used for a few commonly used settings. Try this:

Okay, this works. Thanks much!