How do I break from a loop on keyboard input without plugins?

I have been trying to figure out for a while how to accomplish the following, but I don't want to use plugins. This is because the Psychtoolbox stopped working, and I don't want to fix it:

while 1
    % perform task
    % poll keyboard, do not stop, just check if a button is pressed
    
    if button is pressed 
        break;
    end
end

The faster the polling happens, the better.

[Josh]

did you find a solution?

Answer 1

[Josh]

I've not implemented either of these solutions but seems to be on the right track...

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/80775-how-do-i-exit-a-loop-with-a-key-hit

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/waitforbuttonpress.html

...pretty sure the waitforbuttonpress function followed by a "break" gets you there

[Josh]

might be able to incorporate uiwait and uiresume if you want to do a pause instead of break behavior

[Salah Ad-Din Ahmed]

I used this answer and it works: "You can create a waitbar or any other GUI which contains a button for breaking the loop. Then check a property inside the loop and break is the value chnages. This property could be the existence of the figure or the button as well as the UserData of the button or figure.

ttonHandle = uicontrol('Style', 'PushButton', ...
                         'String', 'Stop loop', ...
                         'Callback', 'delete(gcbf)');
for k = 1:1e6
  disp(k)
  if ~ishandle(ButtonHandle)
    disp('Loop stopped by user');
    break;
  end
end

[Josh]

very nice!