Question

Seems like there should be a simple solution using the time module or something, but I’ve tried a few things and nothing seems to work. I need something like this to work:

hungry = True
if line.find ('feeds'):
    #hungry = False for 60 seconds, then hungry is true again

Anyone have a solution for this?

edit: As for what I’ve tried, I’ve tried this bit of code:

if hungry==True:
     print('yum! not hungry for 20 seconds')
     hungry = False
     i = 20
     while(i>0):
         i-=1
         time.sleep(1)
         if(i==0):
             hungry = True

But that doesn’t work because the program just pauses until hungry is True again, and hungry being false while the program sleeps won’t help; it should be false for a certain amount of time while the rest of the program works

edit: It looks like this won’t be possible without threading. I’ll have to either find a new solution, or learn to use threading. Thanks for all the help anyways, I seriously appreciate it!

Answer 1

You could encapsulate the behaviour you want in a TimedValue class, but that might be overkill here– I’d probably just do something like

now = time.time()
hunger = lambda: time.time() > now + 60

and then use hunger() whenever I wanted the value instead of hungry. That way, the code doesn’t block, and we can continue doing work, but hunger() will give us the right state. E.g.

import time
now = time.time()
hunger = lambda: time.time() > now + 60
for i in range(10):
    print 'doing stuff here on loop', i
    time.sleep(10)
    print 'hunger is', hunger()

produces

doing stuff here on loop 0
hunger is False
doing stuff here on loop 1
hunger is False
doing stuff here on loop 2
hunger is False
doing stuff here on loop 3
hunger is False
doing stuff here on loop 4
hunger is False
doing stuff here on loop 5
hunger is True
doing stuff here on loop 6
hunger is True
doing stuff here on loop 7
hunger is True
doing stuff here on loop 8
hunger is True
doing stuff here on loop 9
hunger is True