PHP CLI - user request to enter or perform actions after a certain period of time

Question

I am trying to create a PHP script where I ask the user to select an option: Basically something like:

echo "Type number of your choice below:"; echo " 1. Perform Action 1"; echo " 2. Perform Action 2"; echo " 3. Perform Action 3 (Default)"; $menuchoice = read_stdin(); if ( $menuchoice == 1) { echo "You picked 1"; } elseif ( $menuchoice == 2) { echo "You picked 2"; } elseif ( $menuchoice == 3) { echo "You picked 3"; } 

This works well, as you can perform certain actions based on user input.

But I would like to expand this so that if the user does not type something within 5 seconds, the default action will be launched automatically without any further user actions.

Is this even possible with PHP ...? Sorry, I'm starting this thread.

Any guidance is appreciated.

Thanks,

Hernando

Answer 1

You can use stream_select() . Here is an example.

 echo "input something ... (5 sec)\n"; // get file descriptor for stdin $fd = fopen('php://stdin', 'r'); // prepare arguments for stream_select() $read = array($fd); $write = $except = array(); // we don't care about this $timeout = 5; // wait for maximal 5 seconds for input if(stream_select($read, $write, $except, $timeout)) { echo "you typed: " . fgets($fd) . PHP_EOL; } else { echo "you typed nothing\n"; } 

Answer 2

For the hek2mgl code to match my example above, the code should look like this:

 echo "input something ... (5 sec)\n"; // get file descriptor for stdin $fd = fopen('php://stdin', 'r'); // prepare arguments for stream_select() $read = array($fd); $write = $except = array(); // we don't care about this $timeout = 5; // wait for maximal 5 seconds for input if(stream_select($read, $write, $except, $timeout)) { // echo "you typed: " . fgets($fd); $menuchoice = fgets($fd); // echo "I typed $menuchoice\n"; if ( $menuchoice == 1){ echo "I typed 1 \n"; } elseif ( $menuchoice == 2){ echo "I typed 2 \n"; } elseif ( $menuchoice == 3){ echo "I typed 3 \n"; } else { echo "Type 1, 2 OR 3... exiting! \n"; } } else { echo "\nYou typed nothing. Running default action. \n"; } 

Hek2mgl thanks again!