Question

Is there a way to accept only numbers in Python, say like using raw_input()?

I know I can always get the input and catch a ValueError exception, but I was interested in knowing whether there was someway I could force the prompt to accept only numbers and freeze on any other input.

Answer 1

From the docs:

How do I get a single keypress at a time?

For Unix variants: There are several
solutions. It’s straightforward to do
this using curses, but curses is a
fairly large module to learn. Here’s a
solution without curses:

import termios, fcntl, sys, os
fd = sys.stdin.fileno()

oldterm = termios.tcgetattr(fd)
newattr = termios.tcgetattr(fd)
newattr[3] = newattr[3] & ~termios.ICANON & ~termios.ECHO
termios.tcsetattr(fd, termios.TCSANOW, newattr)

oldflags = fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_GETFL)
fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_SETFL, oldflags | os.O_NONBLOCK)

try:
    while 1:
        try:
            c = sys.stdin.read(1)
            print "Got character", `c`
        except IOError: pass
finally:
    termios.tcsetattr(fd, termios.TCSAFLUSH, oldterm)
    fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_SETFL, oldflags)

You need the termios and the fcntl
module for any of this to work, and
I’ve only tried it on Linux, though it
should work elsewhere. In this code,
characters are read and printed one at
a time.

termios.tcsetattr() turns off stdin’s
echoing and disables canonical mode.
fcntl.fnctl() is used to obtain
stdin’s file descriptor flags and
modify them for non-blocking mode.
Since reading stdin when it is empty
results in an IOError, this error is
caught and ignored.

Using this, you could grab the character, check if it’s a number, and then display it. I haven’t tried it myself, though.