Question

So I’m trying to do this (access a file on a website, read its contents and perform actions until the content says to exit. The precondition being it has to wait x seconds before accessing the website again; to recheck the contents):

perform = True
while(perform):
 data = urllib.urlopen('someurl')
 data = data.read()
 if(data == '0'):
  dosomething()
 elif(data == '1'):
  #1 signifies to exit the loop
  perform = False
 else:
  time.sleep(10)

However this never seems to work. ‘Someurl’ always has a value. Some Google says that it’s something to do with the sleep function. Please help!

Answer 1

this:

import time
while True:
    print "fetching"
    time.sleep(10)

is the minimal test case and as this always works it can’t be a problem with the time.sleep function