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I am searching for a method to get a single unicode character from the standard input. Recently, I saw this topic in which the solution does not apply for unicode characters but only ASCII ones.

Using the function getch() cited in the mentioned topic, when the user types an unicode character, it is represented as more than one ASCII characters. In fact, getch() only returns the first part (byte). The remaining bytes are only accessible using getch() again (however I do not know how to know how many bytes remain).

Is there a way to actually get a single unicode character from the input?

Thanks!

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pedrormjunior
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1 Answers1

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If you are using UTF-8 the first byte of a multibyte character tells you how many bytes there are. So something like this can work:

c = getch()
first_byte = ord(c)
bytes_remain = 0
while (first_byte >> (6 - bytes_remain)) & 0b11 == 0b11:
    bytes_remain += 1
    c += getch()
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