pattern(3MENU)

✨ pattern — bestie, it's the menu pattern buffer era ✨

soooo this is pattern(3MENU), a lil' library-calls moment from your fave ncurses family. Two functions, one shared brain cell (the pattern buffer), and a whole lot of will it match or will it not energy. Let's get into it 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

#include <menu.h>

int set_menu_pattern(MENU *menu, const char *pattern);
char *menu_pattern(const MENU *menu);

okay so that's the whole vibe up top — one setter, one getter, both hanging out in <menu.h> like the iconic duo they are 🫶

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

Every single menu out here has an associated pattern match buffer, no exceptions. Think of it like the menu's little notes app 📝. As input events that are printable characters roll in, they get appended to this match buffer and then tested for a match — and the whole matching situation is described over in driver(3MENU) if you wanna go read the lore, bestie, it's giving lore.

set_menu_pattern sets the pattern buffer for the given menu and tries to find the first matching item. Two-for-one, we love efficiency ✨. So here's the tea:

• if it succeeds, that matched item becomes the current item — slay, the menu moved 🎉
• if it fails, the current item does not change. Nothing happens. It simply sits there. Periodt.

menu_pattern is the chill one — it just returns the pattern buffer of the given menu. That's it. That's the function. 💖

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⭐ RETURN VALUE ⭐

So menu_pattern returns a pointer, and here's the breakdown bestie, stay with me:

• it's NULL if the menu parameter is NULL — no menu, no pointer, tragic
• otherwise it's a pointer to a string, and that string is empty if no pattern has been set yet
• and ngl, it does not set errno. It's just not that kind of function 😌

Meanwhile set_menu_pattern is the one that can actually fail on you, and it may return these error codes:

• E_OK — the routine succeeded 🥳 slay
• E_BAD_ARGUMENT — the routine detected an incorrect or out-of-range argument. Girl, what did you pass it 💀
• E_BAD_STATE — the routine was called from an initialization or termination function. Wrong place, wrong time, read the room 🙈
• E_NOT_CONNECTED — no items are connected to menu. An empty menu is not beating the lonely allegations 😭
• E_NO_MATCH — the character failed to match. Close but no cigar, it's giving flop 😔
• E_SYSTEM_ERROR — a system error occurred (see errno(3)). Not our fault, blame the system fr fr

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🦋 PORTABILITY 🦋

These routines emulate the System V menu library, so they're out here doing an impression of the classics 🎭. They were not supported on Version 7 or BSD versions — so if you're on ancient BSD energy, this is not your moment, bestie, sorry not sorry.

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

Juergen Pfeifer.</purl> Manual pages and adaptation for new curses by Eric S. Raymond. Legends, honestly, we stan 🌈

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🌟 SEE ALSO 🌟

• ncurses(3NCURSES)
• menu(3MENU)

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and that's the whole page, bestie — go forth and pattern-match, you've got this 💖✨

this lil' manual moment comes to you from ncurses 6.6, dated 2024-12-28 — xoxo, pattern(3MENU), signing off 🎀