Question

I need to prompt to user a msg that tells him to write a number , then I store this number and do some operation on it
After searching in INT 21h I found this :

INT 21h / AH=1 - read character from standard input, with echo, result is stored in AL.
if there is no character in the keyboard buffer, the function waits until any key is pressed. 

example:

    mov ah, 1
    int 21h

The main problem that this only reads one character and represent it as ASCII
so If I need to write the number “357”
I will read it as 3 , 5 , 7

and this is not my goal .
any ideas ?

Answer 1

When you managed to get the user input, put the its pointer in ESI (ESI = address to the string)

.DATA
myNumber BYTE "12345",0        ;for test purpose I declare a string '12345'

Main Proc
    xor ebx,ebx                ;EBX = 0
    mov  esi,offset myNumber   ;ESI points to '12345'

loopme:

    lodsb                      ;load the first byte pointed by ESI in al

    cmp al,'0'                 ;check if it's an ascii number [0-9]
    jb noascii                 ;not ascii, exit
    cmp al,'9'                 ;check the if it's an ascii number [0-9]
    ja noascii                 ;not ascii, exit

    sub al,30h                 ;ascii '0' = 30h, ascii '1' = 31h ...etc.
    cbw                        ;byte to word
    cwd                        ;word to dword
    push eax
    mov eax,ebx                ;EBX will contain '12345' in hexadecimal
    mov ecx,10
    mul ecx                    ;AX=AX*10
    mov ebx,eax
    pop eax
    add ebx,eax
    jmp loopme                 ;continue until ESI points to a non-ascii [0-9] character
    noascii:
    ret                        ;EBX = 0x00003039 = 12345
Main EndP