A to the W

I was reading through the documentation for PHP as I wanted to write a few console applications that would help me with some tasks that I wanted to be scripted. When it came time to gather input from the terminal I found that there were not that many choices available. In fact I could not find any tools using google that would fit my needs. Knowing that I wrote a small wrapper class that will get input from the terminal and explicitly cast it based on the the class function being used.

Here is the raw class:

/*
  terminal input class
  Anthony Wlodarski 2/15/2005
  ant92083 at gmail dot com
  */

class terminal {
  private $input;

  function getLine()
  {
    $this->input = trim(fgets(STDIN));
    return $this->input;
  }

  function getChar()
  {
    $this->input = trim(fgetc(STDIN));
    return (string)$this->input;
  }

  function getInt()
  {
    return (int)$this->getLine();
  }

  function getString()
  {
    return (string)$this->getLine();
  }

  function getDouble()
  {
    return (double)$this->getLine();
  }
}

So going from this class I have wrote a few tests for the class:

require_once('./terminal.php');

$PHPIN = new terminal();

// get a raw line from the terminal
echo "Enter a raw line: ";
$a = $PHPIN->getLine();
echo "Raw line from STDIN: $a\n\n";
var_dump($a);

// get a integer from the terminal
echo "Enter an integer: ";
$b = $PHPIN->getInt();
echo "Type(gettype): " . gettype($b) . " value: $b\n\n";
var_dump($b);

// get a string from the terminal
echo "Enter a string: ";
$c = $PHPIN->getString();
echo "Type(gettype): " . gettype($c) . " value: $c\n\n";
var_dump($c);

// get a float from the terminal
echo "Enter a float: ";
$d = $PHPIN->getDouble();
echo "Type(gettype): " . gettype($d) . " value: $d\n\n";
var_dump($d);

echo "Enter a single character: ";
$e = $PHPIN->getChar();
echo "Type(gettype): " . gettype($e) . " value: $e\n\n";
var_dump($e);

So far it has worked like a charm. There are a couple of things I want to do and those are protection from invalid input as well as move it to a singleton setup. I don't think spawning many different copies of the same generic wrapper would be cost effect on the PHP interpreter.