Question: I've searched around and I can't seem to find a way to represent arrow keys or the escape key as single char in c++. Is this even possible? I would expect that it would be similar to \t or \n for tab and new line respectively. Whenever I search for escaped characters, there's only ever a list of five or six well known characters.

Answer: 
Not possible; keyboards built for some languages have characters that can't be represented in a char, and anyway, how do you represent control-option-command-shift-F11 in a char?

Keyboards send scancodes, which are either some kind of event in a GUI system or a short string of bytes that represent the key. What codes depends on your system, but on most terminal-like systems, [ncurses](http://www.gnu.org/software/ncurses/) knows how to deal with them.
There aren't any escape characters for the arrow keys. They are represented as Keycodes, afaik. I suggest using a higher level input library to detect key presses. If you want to do it from scratch, the approach taken might vary with the specific platform you are programming for.

In any case, back in the days of TURBO C, I used - 

```
//Wait for keypress
//store input in ch  
//see if the ASCII code matches the code for one of the arrow keys  

```