Question

First of all: I don’t mean parsing arguments and options from the process.argv array, but prompting the user and handling input/output. I’ve looked through the Node.js official module list without finding any sections or subsections that mentions input. In fact a search for ‘input’ on that page only gets 1 result which has something to do with YAML.

Anyway, I suppose cli input should be asynchronous and I’ve solved this issue before using stdin.on('data') which was messy to say the least. This seems like a perfect task for a node module which could come with extra goodies such as progress bars, spinners, coloured output, input validation etc.

There probably are some modules out there that does this, but I can’t find any of them.

Help!!

(To clarify, the only functionality I require is the simplification of handling user input)

Answer 1

Search for modules here: http://eirikb.github.com/nipster/

• Prompt: https://github.com/jesusabdullah/node-prompt
• Progress bar: https://github.com/substack/node-multimeter
• Colors: https://github.com/Marak/colors.js
• Input validation: https://github.com/chriso/node-validator
• More input validation (webbish tho): https://github.com/caolan/forms

Also, if you want to write your own: http://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/all.html#readline

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