Python timed input

Question

I'm writing a python game-bot where a user needs to send in an input within a certain amount of time.

My current implementation of this is to spawn a new thread that sleeps for that amount of time, then checks if an input has been sent. A nonce is added as the time could run out after another thread starts which would cause the if chatid in user_threads part to evaluate to true. Should I use this method or is there a better solution to having a timed input (in the sense less likely to fail due to like race conditions).

I've also tried using multiprocessing.Process but sharing variables to the other process seems to be a lot more cumbersome.

from threading import Thread
from time import time, sleep
from random import randint
user_threads = {}
def timeout(t,r):
 while time()-t<5:
 sleep(5-time()+t)
 if chatid in user_threads:
 if user_threads[chatid][3] != r:
 return
 del user_threads[chatid]
 print("Too slow")
def recvans(ans,inp):
 if ans==inp:
 print("yes")
 else:
 print("no")
def starttimer(chatid):
 r = randint(0,1<<128)
 user_threads[chatid] = [None,None,None,r]
 user_threads[chatid][2] = ["a"]
 P = Thread(target = timeout, args = (time(),r))
 user_threads[chatid][0] = P
 user_threads[chatid][1] = recvans
 P.start()
while True: # simulating user input from different users (here chatid=1)
 inp = input()
 chatid = 1
 if chatid in user_threads:
 t, func, args, _ = user_threads[chatid]
 if t == None:
 print("Please wait")
 continue
 del user_threads[chatid]
 args += [inp]
 func(*args)
 continue
 if inp == "Start":
 starttimer(chatid)
 continue
 if inp == "Quit":
 break
 print("Unknown msg")

• vnp: Usually is is done via select.select

Answer 1

What @vnp said. Fundamentally,

• input uses stdin;
• stdin can be interpreted as a file handle so long as you're not in Windows;
• select can wait for data availability on such handles.

There's a lot of internet help on this topic, including https://stackoverflow.com/a/3471853/313768 ; to quote the solution there:

import sys 
from select import select
timeout = 10 
print "Enter something:", 
rlist, _, _ = select([sys.stdin], [], [], timeout) 
if rlist:
 s = sys.stdin.readline()
 print s 
else:
 print "No input. Moving on..."

• Ariana: ahh ic this looks way cleaner for my case since I'm using this in context of a game which receives http(s) requests is there a similar way to do this?