ureadkey(3)

📦 version 4.4.3.1, in fedora 43, fedora 44

✨ ureadkey(3) ✨

okay bestie, pull up a chair, we're doing the Allegro manual thing 💖 this one's about ureadkey(3), aka the girl who actually reads your Unicode keystrokes instead of just squinting at ASCII like it's 1994.

NAME

ureadkey — returns the next unicode character from the keyboard buffer. it's part of the Allegro game programming library, no cap 🎀

SYNOPSIS

#include <allegro.h>

int ureadkey(int *scancode);

DESCRIPTION

so here's the tea ☕ ureadkey() hands you the next character from the keyboard buffer, and it does it in Unicode format. fancy, I know. 💅

if the buffer is empty? she simply waits. sits there. patient queen. doesn't return until a key is actually pressed. 🦋

wanna know if there's stuff already queued up before you commit to a blocking read? check with keypressed(). 👑

the return value is the Unicode value of the key. and that pointer argument? if it's not NULL, it gets set to the scancode. 🎯

and here's the part where she truly ate: unlike readkey(), this function can return character values greater than 255. lowercase behavior, uppercase capability. periodt. ✨

example time, look at her:

int val, scancode;
...
val = ureadkey(&scancode);
if (val == 0x00F1)
   allegro_message("You pressed n with tilde\n");

if (val == 0x00DF)
   allegro_message("You pressed sharp s\n");
⚠️ DOS besties listen UP ⚠️ on DOS you must specify a custom keyboard map (like the ones you'll find in keyboard.dat), usually with the help of a configuration file that specifies the language mapping — that's the keyboard variable, in the system section of allegro.cfg. skip that and you get the default US keyboard mapping. not a vibe, fr fr. 💀

also, you should be able to find Unicode character maps at http://www.unicode.org/. go look, it's giving reference material 🌈

SEE ALSO

🌸 and that's the whole page, bestie 🌸 this was Allegro, version 4.4.3 — mwah, love that for us. now go read some Unicode and slay 💖🫶🎀

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