Comment Input

Send input to your single-file applications with ease!
Just add a comment in your source with desired input and voila!

Aimed at competitive programmers and Data Scientists who spend time debugging small (single file) scripts.

Features

• Select a custom keyphrase
• Supported for all languages that have a block comment and are supported by code-runner*
• Uses VSCode's internal comment settings, no need for extra configuration
• Uses integrated terminal, so you don't have to switch tabs often
• Set custom delay between code compilation and input
• No configuration required on Windows, MacOS and Linux with default VSCode installation**.

* code-runner has some limitations and all those apply to this extension as well.
** For non-default install locations, extension needs to be configured.

Requirements

code-runner is required for this extension to work since VSCode doesn't support hijacking terminal input.

Further, if the extension is not installed in default location, please configure cinp.language_extension_resources_folder. This is required due to a known issue.

On windows, integrated terminal with cmd is required. Powershell will not work.

Extension Settings

• cinp.trigger: Set the keyword for comment identification. Default is "input".
• cinp.input_delay: Set the delay between code compilation and input in milliseconds. Default is "500".
• cinp.language_extension_resources_folder: Set the Language Configuration folder. Automatically set on linux, mac and windows to default locations. Configure only if not a default installation.

---

Usage

A sample script looking as follows:

"""input 4 "abc" """
i, j = input().split(" ")
print(int(i) + 100, j)

Similarly for c++:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
/*input
4 "abc"
*/
int main(){
    string s;
    cin>>s;
    cout<<s<<"\n";
}

will be executed with 4 "abc" sent to stdin of the terminal.

Known Issues

• VSCode doesn't provide an api to read the language settings yet. Thus, I've used a workaround which is not guaranteed to work if your settings are saved in a different location. Issue Link: microsoft/vscode#2871
• There is a delay between sending input and code compilation / execution. Thus, it's possible that delay isn't long enough to account for compilation failures.
• The extension works only if cmd is used as the default terminal profile on Windows.
• Depending on your python version / platform, adding a newline after input might or might not work as expected. Best is to start input from the same line as trigger keyword.
• The input is sent all at once, so if compilation / interpreter failed, then the input is still sent. This is a limitation because there's no way to know the result of compilation / interpreter from previous step.

Contributing

People are invited to help out with code / tests / documentation. Please send PRs / file issues on Github repository itself.

FAQ

• Block comments not working in Python!
  Please ensure that you are using the correct block comment character. Python supports multiline strings with both """ and '''. The one that is set to block comment character in VSCode's language settings is the one that is used. It defaults to """.

Acknowledgement

A similar extension exists in sublime-text as well.
Icon credits: Terminal Icon from freepik.com / flaticon.com. Edited myself via Inkscape.