curs_inch.3x - Man Page

get a curses character from a window

Synopsis

#include <curses.h>

chtype inch(void);
chtype winch(WINDOW *win);

chtype mvinch(int y, int x);
chtype mvwinch(WINDOW *win, int y, int x);

Description

These routines return the character, of type chtype, at the current position in the named window. If any attributes are set for that position, their values are OR'ed into the value returned. Constants defined in <curses.h> can be used with the & (logical AND) operator to extract the character or attributes alone.

Attributes

The following bit masks may be AND-ed with characters returned by winch.

NameDescription
A_CHARTEXTExtract character
A_ATTRIBUTESExtract attributes
A_COLORExtract color pair information

Return Value

Functions with a “mv” prefix first perform a cursor movement using wmove, and return an error if the position is outside the window, or if the window pointer is null.

The winch function does not return an error if the window contains characters larger than 8-bits (255). Only the low-order 8 bits of the character are used by winch.

Notes

Note that all of these routines may be macros.

Portability

These functions are described in the XSI Curses standard, Issue 4.

Very old systems (before standardization) provide a different function with the same name:

X/Open Curses does not specify the size and layout of attributes, color and character values in chtype; it is implementation-dependent. This implementation uses 8 bits for character values. An application using more bits, e.g., a Unicode value, should use the wide-character equivalents to these functions.

See Also

curses(3X)

gives an overview of the WINDOW and chtype data types.

curs_attr(3X)

goes into more detail, pointing out portability problems and constraints on the use of chtype for returning window information.

curs_in_wch(3X)

describes comparable functions for the wide-character (ncursesw) library.

Referenced By

The man pages inch.3x(3), mvinch.3x(3), mvwinch.3x(3) and winch.3x(3) are aliases of curs_inch.3x(3).

2024-01-13 ncurses 6.4 Library calls