OpenEuphoria

Getting user's input from a menu of choices

• Posted by Caracatsanis Pty Ltd <sunpsych at VIC.OZLAND.NET.AU> Aug 13, 2000
• 463 views

I asked recently, how to code for the situation where the user is presented
with a menu consisting of several non mutually exclusive choices... eg MENU
OF CHOICES
              A   this
              B   that
              C   other

        ...or 1   this
              2   that
              3   other

        ...and is prompted to enter them (eg A C; or 1 2 3 )

I now realise my question is more about this:
1   if I try to use choice = get(0) to get the input, I have to know
beforehand how many choices there'll be, to issue get() the right number of
times. Must I ask the user to specify beforehand the number of choices, or
else use a sentinel value?

2   if I use choice = gets(0), I get a sequence of ASCII values. Eg if the
user's input was...    1  3  2
      gets(0) would return  {49,51,50,10}
After removing choice[4], I don't know how to re-create {1,3,2}

I'm particularly interested in ending up with a sequence of numbers,
because I want to use them as indices for elements of other sequences Eg:
sequence all_choices, choice

    all_choices = { "up", "down", "right", "left", "stop" }

    for i = 1 to length(choice) do -- where choice = {1,3,2}
        index = choice[1]
        puts(1, all_choices[index])
    end for

Thanks in advance for any newbie-level solutions.

Alex Caracatsanis