Prompting doesn't support arrow keys

[danielbachhuber]

Trying to go to the beginning of the field instead produces unexpected characters:

Might be a problem upstream.

[scribu]

Requires the readline library.

[rodrigoprimo]

@scribu I have php5-readline installed but I can't use the arrow keys as well. Is anything else necessary?

[scribu]

Run php -i | grep -A2 readline to make sure.

[rodrigoprimo]

$ php -i | grep -A2 readline
/etc/php5/cli/conf.d/20-readline.ini,
/etc/php5/cli/conf.d/20-xdebug.ini

--
readline

Readline Support => enabled

[danielbachhuber]

@rodrigoprimo I'm still of the mind this is an application-level problem. Haven't had time to dive into it further.

[rodrigoprimo]

I think I found the source of the problem. Turns out php-cli-tools is not using using readline(), it uses fgets(STDIN) instead:

https://github.com/wp-cli/php-cli-tools/blob/master/lib/cli/Streams.php#L130

The following seem to fix this issue:

diff --git a/lib/cli/Streams.php b/lib/cli/Streams.php
index b750636..081a6bd 100755
--- a/lib/cli/Streams.php
+++ b/lib/cli/Streams.php
@@ -126,6 +126,8 @@ class Streams {

                if( $format ) {
                        fscanf( static::$in, $format . "\n", $line );
+               } else if ( function_exists( 'readline' ) ) {
+                       $line = readline();
                } else {
                        $line = fgets( static::$in );
                }

But another problem is created, if you use the left arrow to go to the beginning of what you typed, the cursor goes to the beginning of the line, before the question presented to the user. I think this happens because readline() expects the question as a parameter. So we will need to change that as well.

[danielbachhuber]

@rodrigoprimo can you file an issue in php-cli-tools?

[rodrigoprimo]

Sure: wp-cli/php-cli-tools#72