Terminal Methods

Interacting with the Terminal is pretty simple in code. There are basically three methods that you need to care about: WriteLine, Write, and ReadLine.

WriteLine and Write

When you want to display something on the terminal, you use either the WriteLine or Write method. There are lots of different versions of these methods which will allow you to pass many values to be output - so we can think of these as having this declaration, where ... is replaced with data of the different basic data types (integers, numbers, text):

// using static SplashKitSDK.SplashKit;

public static void WriteLine(...);
public static void Write(...);

These methods differ only slightly. The Write method outputs the data that you pass it, while the WriteLine method outputs the data and adds a new line. This means that with Write, the cursor will remain on the same line, and the next output (or input) will appear on the same line as the data written out. Whereas, WriteLine will advance the cursor to the start of the next line.

ReadLine

You can use the Terminal for input as well as output. The ReadLine method allows you to read data from the Terminal, capturing the text the user types, placing it in a string, and returning it to you in a string when the user hits the enter or return key.

You can think of this as having the following method declaration:

// using static SplashKitSDK.SplashKit;

public static string ReadLine();

Converting Data

As you can see above, ReadLine only returns string data. When you need this to be a number, you need to convert it. The C# library provides a number of conversion methods in its Convert code. We can use these with ReadLine to convert data the user enters into either an integer (int32) or a double.

// These need..
// using static System.Convert;

public static int ToInt32(string value);
public static double ToDouble(string value);

Example

You can use these as shown below:

using static SplashKitSDK.SplashKit;
using static System.Convert;

string name;
int age;

Write("Enter your name: ");
name = ReadLine();

WriteLine($"Hello {name}!");

Write("How old are you? Enter your age: ");
age = ToInt32(ReadLine());

To remove the warning about the data returned from ReadLine, I have updated my csproj file to be as shown below.

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
    <TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
    <Nullable>disable</Nullable>
  </PropertyGroup>
</Project>