Input from buffer instead of minibuffer

[Michael Haensel <mhaensel73@gmail.com>]

Hello everyone -

I'm writing a quiz program in Emacs Lisp. The program creates a new frame and buffer for the quiz questions. The quiz then runs something like this:

(insert "Please identify: [quiz item]")
(setq response
       (read-from-minibuffer "Please identify: [quiz item]"))
... do stuff based on response

This displays the question in the buffer and the minibuffer. The response is read in from the minibuffer. This isn't deal-breakingly bad, but a better design would read the response from the buffer and skip the minibuffer entirely.

Is there an easy way to read a response from the buffer instead of the minibuffer? If it matters, a "response" is a string of 1-8 alphabetic characters terminated by a newline/return key.