Curses is detecting previous pressed keys

Question

this feels like a very trivial problem but after searching and experimenting for hours I couldn't reach a single solution.

I'm using curses to move my robot using the keyboard keys, it works as intended but for 1 thing, every time that a "getch()" is hit it executes previous pressed keys even if there is nothing being pressed, that creates a 'lag' situation.

This is a very simple scenario that I created to explain myself, in here let's say that I press 'a', which works correctly, I keep it pressed for around 4 more seconds and release, now this code will be executed again and again even if there is nothing being pressed because curses will execute it x times for all the 'a' that I pressed during the time.sleep:

import curses
import time
stdscr = None

def SetupCurses():
    global stdscr
    stdscr = curses.initscr()
    curses.cbreak()
    stdscr.keypad(1)


def StartCurse():

    key = ''
    while key != ord('q'):
        stdscr.clear()
        stdscr.refresh()
        key = stdscr.getch()
        if key == ord('a'):
            print("\nyou pressed a\n")
            time.sleep(5)
            print("\nyou can press a again\n")
            time.sleep(1)

while(True):
    SetupCurses()
    StartCurse()

So I thought, well, I didn't want to do that but I will completely kill curses and connect it again before checking for keys, but even after doing that curses seem to be picking up keys that it shouldn't (and I really dislike this approach anyway, I feel like I shouldn't need to shut it down like this if I will use it again and again), this scenario will have the same problem of the scenario above:

import curses
import time
stdscr = None

def SetupCurses():
    global stdscr
    stdscr = curses.initscr()
    curses.cbreak()
    stdscr.keypad(1)


def StartCurse():

    key = ''
    while key != ord('q'):
        stdscr.clear()
        stdscr.refresh()
        key = stdscr.getch()
        if key == ord('a'):
            break

def EndCurse():
    global stdscr
    curses.nocbreak()
    stdscr.keypad(False)
    curses.echo()
    curses.endwin()
    stdscr = None

while(True):  
    SetupCurses()

    print("\nyou can press a again\n")
    time.sleep(1)

    StartCurse()  
    EndCurse()

    time.sleep(5)
    print("\nyou pressed a\n")

My question is: is there some sort of code that does:

curses.ClearAnyPreviousInput()
ThisKeyIsBeingPressedRightNow = stdscr.getch()

if possible something that doesn't force me to kill and restart everything again

Answer 1

It seems you need curses.flushinp()

Flush all input buffers. This throws away any typeahead that has been typed by the user and has not yet been processed by the program.

---

Eventually you can try to remove repeated keys

new_key = stdscr.getch()

while new_key == key:
      new_key = stdscr.getch()

key = new_key

(found in C code in answer for Configure key repeat delay to detect if key is being pressed)