[Tutor] stop a loop after precise amount of time

[Steven D'Aprano]

On 25/11/12 22:01, Saad Javed wrote:
> time.sleep(30) will pause the program for 30s. I want to the run the
> program for 30s.


Your first email did not make that clear. Please take more care to
explain your question.



stop = time.time() + 30
while time.time() < stop:
     do_something_useful()
print "Done"



This will not interrupt do_something_useful, it only checks the
time at the start of each loop. That's simple and easy and very
often is close enough.

But if you want to interrupt do_something_useful when 30s is up,
that becomes much, much, much harder. See here for an explanation
of why it is hard:

http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/08/22/how-not-to-set-a-timeout-on-a-computation-in-python/

and here for one possible solution:

http://pguides.net/python-tutorial/python-timeout-a-function/



-- 
Steven