Text boxes

[iPhill]

hey, basically I'm trying to create my own scripting language, it's all going well but in order to code you have to do everything in notepad. Basically, I want to create an application that has a text box where users can input the code, click a button that says "Save" and it saves everything to a text file...

How would I do this please?

[Michael Hall]

Are you wondering how to do the interface code or the file handling code?

Mike

[iPhill]

Are you wondering how to do the interface code or the file handling code?

Mike

Just the interface code please... I think I can manage the file handling.

[Michael Hall]

There is a text editor that was written by Charles Petzold called "Poppad," which was published in his classic book on windows programming. The code is explained in the text and has multiple versions. I found one version of the code here, but I haven't tested it. It may have more or less functionality than you're looking for, but it should get you started.

Mike

[Paul]

You can create a multi-line edit box with Win32 quite easily:

Code:

   
RECT R;
GetClientRect(Hw,&R); // to fill the owner window with the edit box

EditHw=CreateWindowEx(0,"EDIT","",
        WS_CHILD|ES_MULTILINE|ES_WANTRETURN|ES_AUTOHSCROLL|ES_AUTOVSCROLL|WS_HSCROLL|WS_VSCROLL,
        0,0,R.right-R.left,R.bottom-R.top,Hw,0,0,0);

    ShowWindow(EditHw,SW_SHOW);

This will provide most normal text editing functions by default.

You can get the text into a std::string like this:

Code:

int Ln=SendMessage(EditHw,WM_GETTEXTLENGTH,0,0);
std::vector<char> V(Ln+1);

SendMessage(EditHw,WM_GETTEXT,Ln+1,LPARAM(&(V[0])));

std::string S(V.begin(),V.end()-1);

// S now contains the text from the edit box

or set the text like this:

Code:

std::string S="This is some text";
SendMessage(EditHw,EM_REPLACESEL,WPARAM(false),LPARAM(S.c_str()));

There are a vast amount of other operations you can do - see the MSDN docs on "Working with edit boxes" for more details or post back if you have specific questions.