How to detect ESCape keypress in Python?

Python 3 strings are unicode and, therefore, must be encoded to bytes for comparison. Try this test:

if msvcrt.kbhit() and msvcrt.getch() == chr(27).encode():
    aborted = True
    break

Or this test:

if msvcrt.kbhit() and msvcrt.getch().decode() == chr(27):
    aborted = True
    break

Or this test:

if msvcrt.kbhit() and ord(msvcrt.getch()) == 27:
    aborted = True
    break