So, I am working on a quiz taking program that works from the command line and the quizzes have time limits. What I want to do, is to stop the quiz right when the user's time is up even if they're in the middle of answering a question. I am using Java's Scanner to get the user's input, so I want to essentially tell the Scanner object to terminate even if it's in the middle of accepting input.
Now, I know that I can retroactively punish a user for going over time after the fact, but I simply want the quiz to terminate once the time limit has been exceeded. Is there any way to do this with multithreading for example?
解决方案
A Java Scanner is using blocking operations. It is not possible to stop it. Not even using Thread.interrupt();
You can however read using a BufferedLineReader and be able to stop the thread. It's not a neat solution, as it involves pausing for short moments (otherwise it would use 100 % CPU), but it does work.
public static class ConsoleInputReadTask {
private final AtomicBoolean stop = new AtomicBoolean();
public void stop() {
stop.set(true);
}
public String requestInput() throws IOException {
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
System.out.println("ConsoleInputReadTask run() called.");
String input;
do {
System.out.println("Please type something: ");
try {
// wait until we have data to complete a readLine()
while (!br.ready() && !stop.get()) {
Thread.sleep(200);
}
input = br.readLine();
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
System.out.println("ConsoleInputReadTask() cancelled");
return null;
}
} while ("".equals(input));
System.out.println("Thank You for providing input!");
return input;
}
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
final Thread scannerThread = new Thread(new Runnable() {
@Override
public void run() {
try {
String string = new ConsoleInputReadTask().requestInput();
System.out.println("Input: " + string);
}
catch (IOException e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
}
});
scannerThread.start();
new Thread(new Runnable() {
@Override
public void run() {
try {
Thread.sleep(5000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
scannerThread.interrupt();
}
}).start();
}