Extracting information about key pressed in .NET console applications

Console applications let you extract the key(s) pressed by the user using the Console.ReadKey() method. It returns an object of type ConsoleKeyInfo which includes a number of useful properties.

ConsoleKeyInfo has the following properties:

• Key: returns an enumeration of type ConsoleKey. Examples include ConsoleKey.A, ConsoleKey.PrintScreen, ConsoleKey.Help etc., i.e. there’s an entry for each key on a keyboard. There are more than 240 values in this enumeration.
• KeyChar: same as the above but it returns the key pressed as a char where it makes sense. E.g. F11 is not associated with a character, KeyChar will be an empty character ‘\0’. Also, if the combined value of the keys pressed produces whitespace or an empty character then KeyChar will be ‘\0’. Example: ctrl+alt+s
• Modifiers: returns an enumeration of type ConsoleModifiers which holds the values for the Alt, Shift and Control keys

The following code sample prints each of these properties:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
	RunPressKeyCodeSample();
}

private static void RunPressKeyCodeSample()
{
	ConsoleKeyInfo keyInfo = Console.ReadKey();
	ConsoleKey keyPressed = keyInfo.Key;
	Debug.WriteLine("Key pressed: {0}", keyPressed);
	char keyChar = keyInfo.KeyChar;
	Debug.WriteLine("Char format: {0}", keyChar);
	ConsoleModifiers modifiers = keyInfo.Modifiers;
	Debug.WriteLine("Any modifiers: {0}", modifiers);
}

Here’s an example output when ctrl+shift+F11 are pressed:

Key pressed: F11
Char format:
Any modifiers: Shift, Control

Here comes another example when shift+p are pressed:

Key pressed: P
Char format: P
Any modifiers: Shift

View all various C# language feature related posts here.