# Giving your program input

> The Input tab holds everything your program will read, handed over before it starts. Why nothing pauses to ask you, and what that changes.

Source: https://www.revquix.com/docs/projects/giving-your-program-input
Last verified: 2026-09-03

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If your program reads input, put it in the **Input** tab before you run.

## There is no keyboard on the other side

Your code runs in a sandbox with no terminal attached. Whatever is in the Input box is handed to the
program as standard input, exactly as if you had piped a file into it on your own machine.

Two consequences follow, and between them they explain almost every surprise:

1. **All of it arrives before your first line runs.** The box is not a keyboard buffer being typed
   into as you go. Every read takes the next piece of something already there.
2. **Prompts print, they do not wait.** `print("Enter your name: ")` still prints - it just does not
   stop anything. Two prompts in a row land on the same line, because nothing happened in between.

## If you ask for more than you gave

There is no prompt to fall back on. If your code reads four values and the box holds three, the
fourth read has nothing to take, and what happens then is your language's normal end-of-input
behaviour - an exception in Java, an empty string in Python, and so on.

> **Note** - The Input tab has a walkthrough built in
>
> Open the Input tab and there is a short illustrated guide covering token-versus-line reading, the
> "it ate my string" case after reading a number, and the exact recipe for each language. It is more
> detailed than this page and it is right next to the box - use it when a read is behaving oddly.

## SQL is different

A SQL project has no separate input in this sense - the runner feeds your query in. There is nothing
to put in the box.

- [Running your code](https://www.revquix.com/docs/projects/running-your-code) - Which file Run executes.

- [SQL projects](https://www.revquix.com/docs/projects/sql-projects) - How a query is run.