NAME

       inch, winch, mvinch, mvwinch - get a character and attributes from a curses 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.

       A_CHARTEXT     Bit-mask to extract character
       A_ATTRIBUTES   Bit-mask to extract attributes
       A_COLOR        Bit-mask to extract color-pair field 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:

       •   The  winch  function  was  part  of  the  original BSD curses library, which stored a 7-bit character
           combined with the standout attribute.

           In BSD curses, winch returned only the character (as an integer) with the standout attribute removed.

       •   System V curses added support for several video attributes which could be combined with characters in
           the window.

           Reflecting this improvement, the function was altered to return the character combined with all video
           attributes in a chtype value.

       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

       ncurses(3NCURSES)
            gives an overview of the WINDOW and chtype data types.

       attr(3NCURSES)
            goes into more detail, pointing out portability problems and constraints on the use  of  chtype  for
            returning window information.

       in_wch(3NCURSES)
            describes comparable functions for the wide-character (ncursesw) library.

                                                                                                  inch(3NCURSES)