Question

I have a piece of code that is within an infinite loop. I would like to implement a method which checks whether I press a button or not as a loop breaker.

while(true)
{
...
   if(this.escapeKeyIsPressed()) //Should return true if escape is pressed at that milisecond
   {
       ... 
       break; 
   }
}

What is the easiest way to do this in java ? Which library should I look into ?

Thanks in advance for your time.

Answer 1

This page presents a method of setting the console into non-blocking mode in order to read a character, which you could use to break your loop. It also presents a few other methods for both Python and Java, but it has to be considered somewhat hacky and non-portable (wouldn’t work under Windows for example). I don’t think there is a ‘nice’ easy way to do it I’m afraid.