Using an ASCII value as a condition - c++

Question

The following program should read some integer values from input and store them into an array until the user presses "Esc" key, but i cannot figure out how to do that. I have tried to use it's ASCII value as a condition but it doesn't work, or I'm doing something wrong.Could somebody please help me? Here is the code :
void main(){
int i=0, a[MAX];
cout <<"Please enter several integer numbers and press Esc when you want to finish" << endl;
while ((i != char(27)) && (i < MAX)) {
cin >> a[i];
i++;
}

Answer 1

There are several problems here. The first, and most important,
is that most systems will do line oriented input, which means
that they will pick up a lot of control characters (including,
probably, ESC) and do something with them internally, rather
than returning them to you; it might not even be possible to
ever see an ESC in the input.
For the rest, there are several problems with your code. The
first is that you're testing against the index into the array
(where you'll put the next character), not against anything
you've read. The second is that you're inputting int, so you
won't see any individual characters; just the results of the
conversion of your input. (In fact, if an ESC character does
get through, you'll end up with std::cin in a error state.)
The third is that you never test whether the input has
succeeded.
A better solution would be to adopt some other convention for
the input: say one number per line, with an empty line signaling
the end. In that case, you could write something like:
std::vector<int> a;
std::string line;
std::cout << "..." << std::endl;
while ( std::getline( std::cin, line ) && !line.empty() ) {
std::istringstream parse( line );
int value;
parse >> value >> std::ws;
if ( !parse ) {
std::cout << "That wasn't an integer, try again" << std::endl;
} else if ( parse.get() != EOF ) {
std::cout << "Extra garbage at end of line, ignoring it" << std::endl;
} else {
a.push_back( value );
}
}
(You'll note that I've used std::vector, since you don't know
up front how many inputs you'll get.)
If you really want to use ESC, you'll probably need a third
party library, along the lines of curses, to do raw input,
reading one character at a time, and collecting the digits into
a string, for conversion using std::istringstream.

Answer 2

Do not do this use James method its much better and will run on evrything but just for the sake of answering a question you can do this. This will not work on all platforms It works on visual c++ compiler.
# include <iostream>
# include <conio.h>
# include <vector>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
char key;
vector<int> a;
int temp = 0;
while ((key = getch()) != 27)
{
cin >> temp;
a.push_back(temp);
}
for (int i = 0 ; i < a.size() ; i++)
{
cout << a.at(i) << endl;
}
printf("Exit");
cout << endl;
system("Pause");
return 0;
}
Edit: Programs clearer now. Note this program should not be used it is very platform and compiler dependant.