How to See if a key is down

[TheP3]

I want to see what key is being pressed. Without having to check isDown("a" || "b"...). Does love have some kind of function for that? Thx

[MarekkPie]

LOL I literally was typing the EXACT same question while you were typing yours.

[TheP3]

LOL... I have to make an input field...

[tentus]

I don't really get the question. You want to know what is pressed, but not what is down. In my mind, the two are synonymous.

Now, in regards to making a input field: use love.keypressed to get input. if it's a valid character, add it to a string. If not, do other things with it (for example, backspace would remove chars using string.sub). Profit!

[MarekkPie]

For your situation, I think there is a snippet in love.keypressed() for inputting text:

https://love2d.org/wiki/love.keypressed

And since its game-specific, I doubt you'd have a problem with just following that. Mine, on the other hand, has a few more issues to handle.

[TheP3]

I don't really get the question. You want to know what is pressed, but not what is down. In my mind, the two are synonymous.

Now, in regards to making a input field: use love.keypressed to get input. if it's a valid character, add it to a string. If not, do other things with it (for example, backspace would remove chars using string.sub). Profit!

Thanks!

[josefnpat]

Maybe I didn't read this thread properly, but don't you want love.keyboard.isDown( key ) ?

[MarekkPie]

Maybe I didn't read this thread properly, but don't you want love.keyboard.isDown( key ) ?

You've got the order a bit wrong. For love.keyboard.isDown(k), you already know what key you want to check, and the return value is whether or not that specific key is pressed. It does not TELL you which key is pressed. You could supposedly use this to get it to work, but it is EXTREMELY bulky. Something like:

Code: Select all

if love.keyboard.isDown("a") then
  -- do something
elseif love.keyboard.isDown("b") then
  -- do something
elseif love.keyboard.isDown("c") then
  -- ...

Doing what everyone here suggests gets rid of the tediousness of this approach. Just catch the key parameter from love.keypressed(key) and add it to a string.

[ston]

It might be worth adding that if you need to check for modifiers (or more generally, more than any one key being pressed) at 'key event time' (i.e. when a key is pressed), then as far as I understand it, you'll need to add some 'is down?' checks to the keypressed() method, e.g. noddy code:

Code: Select all

function love.keypressed(key)

	-- check for modifiers
	CTRL_KEY = ""
	SHIFT_KEY = ""
	ALT_KEY = ""
	if love.keyboard.isDown("lctrl") or love.keyboard.isDown("rctrl") then
		CTRL_KEY = "CTRL"
	end

	if love.keyboard.isDown("lshift") or love.keyboard.isDown("rshift") then
		SHIFT_KEY = "SHIFT"
	end

	if love.keyboard.isDown("lalt") or love.keyboard.isDown("ralt") then
		ALT_KEY = "ALT"
	end

	key_pressed = CTRL_KEY .. " " .. SHIFT_KEY .. " " .. ALT_KEY .. " " .. key

end

I'm just setting strings here, to illustrate the point (in .draw(), I was just printing out the 'key_pressed' string); you could set flags or take some other action as required or course :-)

[thelinx]

That is a bad solution for text input boxes.
You should use the second argument to keypressed, unicode.