Win32 – read from stdin with timeout

I had to solve a similar problem. On Windows it is not as easy or obvious as Linux. It is, however, possible. The trick is that Windows places console events in the console input event queue. You’ve got to filter out the events you don’t care about and only process those events you do care about (like key presses).

For further reading: see the Win32 console documentation

Here is some mostly-debugged sample code based on a socket and stdin multiplexer I was working on:

void ProcessStdin(void)
{
    INPUT_RECORD record;
    DWORD numRead;
    if(!ReadConsoleInput(GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE), &record, 1, &numRead)) {
        // hmm handle this error somehow...
        return;
    }

    if(record.EventType != KEY_EVENT) {
        // don't care about other console events
        return;
    }

    if(!record.Event.KeyEvent.bKeyDown) {
        // really only care about keydown
        return;
    }

    // if you're setup for ASCII, process this:
    //record.Event.KeyEvent.uChar.AsciiChar

} // end ProcessStdin

int main(char argc, char* argv[])
{
    HANDLE eventHandles[] = {
        GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE)
        // ... add more handles and/or sockets here
        };

    DWORD result = WSAWaitForMultipleEvents(sizeof(eventHandles)/sizeof(eventHandle[0]), 
        &eventHandles[0], 
        FALSE, 
        1000, 
        TRUE
        );

    switch(result) {
        case WSA_WAIT_TIMEOUT: // no I/O going on right now
            break;

        case WSA_WAIT_EVENT_0 + 0: // stdin at array index 0
            ProcessStdin();
            break;

        case WSA_WAIT_EVENT_0 + 1: // handle/socket at array index 1
            break;

        case WSA_WAIT_EVENT_0 + 2: // ... and so on
            break;

        default: // handle the other possible conditions
            break;
    } // end switch result
}