Related
I am writing a game using Python and Tkinter and I need to display how much time the player has left.
I need a function to run regularly and update my time_left variable.
I can't use a while loop because my program will be stuck in it forever.
How do I keep track of time here?
import time
start = time.time()
end = time.time()
time_consumed=end-start;
time_left=10-time_consumed;
10 being the time limit.
You can you this code to start noting and print the time taken by user
To create a game i think you will still need a loop (game loop). Inside that loop, use datetime and timedelta
from datetime import datetime and timedelta
In your game loop, set a condition;
now = datetime.now()
if datetime.now() <= now + timedelta(minutes=How_many_minutes_you_want_to_run_the_game):
run_the_game
else:
stop_the_game
Inside that loop you can simply create a variable to store the current time OR final time(datetime.now() + timedelta(minutes=How_many_minutes_you_want_to_run_the_game) - datetime.now()) which is time remaining.
EXAMPLE:
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
now = datetime.now()
while datetime.now() < (now + timedelta(seconds=2)):
print(datetime.now())
This code will print the present time for 2 seconds. You can also set some delay(delay of 1 sec) to print time after each second passes.
I'm creating a loop which executes every 5 seconds, starting at the startTime variable and ending at the stopTime variable. However, the code below is disregarding the minutes within my startTime and endTime variables and only executing on the hour. For example, even though my startTime is '1130', the code is executing 11:05, rather than ending the loop. I have the same problem with the endTime variable. If the current time is 12:45, the code still executes even though the endTime variable is '1230'. The code will stop executing at '1300'.
frequency = 5
startTime = '1130'
endTime = '1230'
while True:
now = datetime.now().strftime('%H:%M:%S')
if startTime <= now <= endTime:
print('Loop is working. Time is: ',now)
time.sleep(frequency)
else:
print('Loop is stopped')
break
I live in Central Time, so I tried switching to Eastern timezone by modifying the "now" variable to:
now = datetime.now(timezone('US/Eastern')).strftime('%H:%M:%S.%f %Z')
but I still get the same problem when I substitute eastern times with startTime and endTime when using the eastern datetime.now().
Is executing code at a precise minute possible with strftime()?
EDIT: (this is now the answer to the real question (oops))
If you want to wait till for example 11:30 (which was the real question)
you can calculate the time (in seconds) the program should sleep (and let it sleep for that time):
def wait_till(hour, minute, second=0):
# get system time (and date)
now_time = datetime.datetime.now()
# create time point we are waiting for (this year, this month and this day)
wait_till_time = datetime.datetime(year=now_time.year, month=now_time.month, day=now_time.day, hour=hour, minute=minute, second=second)
# calculate time we want to wait for and convert to seconds
wait_for = (wait_till_time - now_time).total_seconds()
# check if it's going to be tomorrow (if we would sleep for a negative amount of seconds)
if wait_for < 0:
# add one day
wait_till_time = wait_till_time.replace(day=now_time.day+1)
# recalculate (not very beautiful, but i don't know a better way)
wait_for = (wait_till_time - now_time).total_seconds()
# printing this waiting time (in seconds)
print("waiting for",wait_for,"seconds")
# sleeping for that time
time.sleep(wait_for)
# printing the new now time, so we can see how accurate it is
print("its now",datetime.datetime.now())
and say for example:
wait_till(20, 24) # waiting till 20:24 (today)
and get:
waiting for 15.32297 seconds
its now 2019-03-11 20:24:00.003857
which is pretty darn close to what we wanted (20:24:00.000000) and this delay is probably only caused by the calculation lag of formatting the string.
(The old stuff ...)
if it's not important that it takes 100% 5s (but rather 100.04546642303467% --> it will get off a little bit every time) you can just do
import time
frequency = 5 #every 5 seconds
start_time = time.time()
while 1:
elspsed_time = time.time() - start_time
print(elspsed_time)
time.sleep(frequency)
but if you need the 100% you can try this autocorrecting solution:
import time
from threading import Timer
frequency = 5 #every 5 seconds
start_time = time.time()
def what_to_do_after_5s():
elapsed_time = time.time() - start_time
print(elapsed_time)
# next call
Timer(5.0 - (elapsed_time - int(elapsed_time)), what_to_do_after_5s, ()).start()
what_to_do_after_5s()
and we can see that it autocorrects:
0.0
5.000170707702637
10.000272989273071
15.000539064407349
20.001248836517334
25.00046443939209
30.000929355621338
35.00142860412598
40.0007688999176
45.00128436088562
50.00045442581177
55.000683069229126
60.00123882293701
65.00095415115356
70.0015127658844
I'd like to execute a function a random number of times each day between set periods. Here's what I have so far:
def get_epochtime(dt=datetime.now()):
EPOCH = datetime(1970, 1, 1)
return (dt - EPOCH).total_seconds()
def get_todays_run_schedule(runs_per_day, run_between):
now = datetime.now()
window_start = now.replace(hour=run_between[0])
window_end = now.replace(hour=run_between[1])
the_schedule = [ get_epochtime(radar.random_datetime(start=window_start, stop=window_end)) for t in range(randint(runs_per_day[0], runs_per_day[1])) ]
the_schedule.sort()
print("Today I will run %s times" % len(the_schedule))
for run_at in the_schedule:
print("I will run at " + time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M", time.localtime(run_at)))
return the_schedule
# we will run between 2 and 4 times per day between the hours of 10 AM and 5 PM.
schedule = get_todays_run_schedule((2, 4), (10, 17))
while(True):
now = datetime.now()
nowsecs = get_epochtime(now)
if now.hour == 0 and now.minute == 0 and now.second == 0:
schedule = get_todays_run_schedule()
if nowsecs in schedule:
execute_my_function
sleep(1)
Basically the idea is that at midnight and at first run, we come up with a run schedule which is a list of epoch times, the length of which is between two supplied integers. Each second we check the time and if the current time is within the list of run times, we execute our function. Finally, we sleep until the next second.
However, it isn't working at all. I suspect this might be because my datetime objects somehow include microseconds which is throwing off the comparison, but it could be because of something I'm not understanding about the nature of date time comparisons in python.
It's true that microseconds will be a problem for you here—both the objects in your list and the now will have microseconds, and running a loop only about once/second, the chance of any of those nows exactly matching an event timestamp are pretty slim.
But even if you fix that by truncating both now and the values in the list to seconds, that still won't solve the problem, it'll just make it an intermittent problem that's harder to debug. Consider what happens if you have an event at 15:25:26, and you start the loop at 15:25:25.907. You truncate that to 15:25:25, look it up, it's not there. Then you sleep for about a second, and call now(), and you get, say, 15:25:27.033. You truncate that to 15:25:27, look it up, and it's not there either.
Since you've already sorted the list, you can do something a whole lot simpler, which I'll demonstrate below. But first: While we're at it, the whole point of datetime objects is that they can do time comparisons, arithmetic, etc. directly, so you don't need to convert everything to numbers with something like your get_epochtime.
yesterday = datetime.today() - datetime.timedelta(days=1)
while True:
now = datetime.now()
if now.date() > yesterday:
schedule = get_todays_run_schedule()
yesterday = now.date()
while schedule and now >= schedule[0]:
del schedule[0]
execute_my_function
sleep(1)
(Obviously you'll also need to change get_todays_run_schedule to return a list of datetime objects instead of a list of floats to do it this way, but you should be able to figure that out.)
Also, notice that this way, we always know the time until the next event, so we don't need to loop around sleep(1) and keep waking the computer every second while it's on battery. You can just sleep(schedule[0] - now) when there is a next event, or sleep until midnight when there isn't. Or, maybe more simply, generate tomorrow's schedule when schedule goes empty, and then just sleep until its schedule[0].
In fact, if you think about it, you should be able to figure how to turn this into a loop in this form:
while True:
schedule = make_today_or_tomorrow_schedule()
for event in schedule:
while datetime.now() < event:
sleep(event - datetime.now())
execute_my_function
I know that I can cause a thread to sleep for a specific amount of time with:
time.sleep(NUM)
How can I make a thread sleep until 2AM? Do I have to do math to determine the number of seconds until 2AM? Or is there some library function?
( Yes, I know about cron and equivalent systems in Windows, but I want to sleep my thread in python proper and not rely on external stimulus or process signals.)
Here's a half-ass solution that doesn't account for clock jitter or adjustment of the clock. See comments for ways to get rid of that.
import time
import datetime
# if for some reason this script is still running
# after a year, we'll stop after 365 days
for i in xrange(0,365):
# sleep until 2AM
t = datetime.datetime.today()
future = datetime.datetime(t.year,t.month,t.day,2,0)
if t.hour >= 2:
future += datetime.timedelta(days=1)
time.sleep((future-t).total_seconds())
# do 2AM stuff
You can use the pause package, and specifically the pause.until function, for this:
import pause
from datetime import datetime
pause.until(datetime(2015, 8, 12, 2))
Slightly more generalized solution (based off of Ross Rogers') in case you'd like to add minutes as well.
def sleepUntil(self, hour, minute):
t = datetime.datetime.today()
future = datetime.datetime(t.year, t.month, t.day, hour, minute)
if t.timestamp() > future.timestamp():
future += datetime.timedelta(days=1)
time.sleep((future-t).total_seconds())
Another approach, using sleep, decreasing the timeout logarithmically.
def wait_until(end_datetime):
while True:
diff = (end_datetime - datetime.now()).total_seconds()
if diff < 0: return # In case end_datetime was in past to begin with
time.sleep(diff/2)
if diff <= 0.1: return
Building on the answer of #MZA and the comment of #Mads Y
One possible approach is to sleep for an hour. Every hour, check if the time is in the middle of the night. If so, proceed with your operation. If not, sleep for another hour and continue.
If the user were to change their clock in the middle of the day, this approach would reflect that change. While it requires slightly more resources, it should be negligible.
I tried the "pause" pacakage. It does not work for Python 3.x. From the pause package I extracted the code required to wait until a specific datetime and made the following def.
def wait_until(execute_it_now):
while True:
diff = (execute_it_now - datetime.now()).total_seconds()
if diff <= 0:
return
elif diff <= 0.1:
time.sleep(0.001)
elif diff <= 0.5:
time.sleep(0.01)
elif diff <= 1.5:
time.sleep(0.1)
else:
time.sleep(1)
adapt this:
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from time import sleep
now = datetime.utcnow
to = (now() + timedelta(days = 1)).replace(hour=1, minute=0, second=0)
sleep((to-now()).seconds)
Slightly beside the point of the original question:
Even if you don't want to muck around with crontabs, if you can schedule python scripts to those hosts, you might be interested to schedule anacron tasks? anacron's major differentiator to cron is that it does not rely the computer to run continuously. Depending on system configuration you may need admin rights even for such user-scheduled tasks.
A similar, more modern tool is upstart provided by the Ubuntu folks: http://upstart.ubuntu.com/
This does not yet even have the required features. But scheduling jobs and replacing anacron is a planned feature. It has quite some traction due to its usage as Ubuntu default initd replacement. (I am not affiliated with the project)
Of course, with the already provided answer, you can code the same functionality into your python script and it might suit you better in your case.
Still, for others, anacron or similar existing systems might be a better solution. anacron is preinstalled on many current linux distributions (there are portability issues for windows users).
Wikipedia provides a pointer page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacron
If you do go for a python version I'd look at the asynchronous aspect, and ensure the script works even if the time is changed (daylight savings, etc) as others have commented already. Instead of waiting til a pre-calculated future, I'd always at maximum wait one hour, then re-check the time. The compute cycles invested should be negligible even on mobile, embedded systems.
Asynchronous version of Omrii's solution
import datetime
import asyncio
async def sleep_until(hour: int, minute: int, second: int):
"""Asynchronous wait until specific hour, minute and second
Args:
hour (int): Hour
minute (int): Minute
second (int): Second
"""
t = datetime.datetime.today()
future = datetime.datetime(t.year, t.month, t.day, hour, minute, second)
if t.timestamp() > future.timestamp():
future += datetime.timedelta(days=1)
await asyncio.sleep((future - t).total_seconds())
I know is way late for this, but I wanted to post an answer (inspired on the marked answer) considering systems that might have - incorrect - desired timezone + include how to do this threaded for people wondering how.
It looks big because I'm commenting every step to explain the logic.
import pytz #timezone lib
import datetime
import time
from threading import Thread
# using this as I am, check list of timezone strings at:
## https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
TIMEZONE = pytz.timezone("America/Sao_Paulo")
# function to return desired seconds, even if it's the next day
## check the bkp_time variable (I use this for a bkp thread)
## to edit what time you want to execute your thread
def get_waiting_time_till_two(TIMEZONE):
# get current time and date as our timezone
## later we remove the timezone info just to be sure no errors
now = datetime.datetime.now(tz=TIMEZONE).replace(tzinfo=None)
curr_time = now.time()
curr_date = now.date()
# Make 23h30 string into datetime, adding the same date as current time above
bkp_time = datetime.datetime.strptime("02:00:00","%H:%M:%S").time()
bkp_datetime = datetime.datetime.combine(curr_date, bkp_time)
# extract the difference from both dates and a day in seconds
bkp_minus_curr_seconds = (bkp_datetime - now).total_seconds()
a_day_in_seconds = 60 * 60 * 24
# if the difference is a negative value, we will subtract (- with + = -)
# it from a day in seconds, otherwise it's just the difference
# this means that if the time is the next day, it will adjust accordingly
wait_time = a_day_in_seconds + bkp_minus_curr_seconds if bkp_minus_curr_seconds < 0 else bkp_minus_curr_seconds
return wait_time
# Here will be the function we will call at threading
def function_we_will_thread():
# this will make it infinite during the threading
while True:
seconds = get_waiting_time_till_two(TIMEZONE)
time.sleep(seconds)
# Do your routine
# Now this is the part where it will be threading
thread_auto_update = Thread(target=function_we_will_thread)
thread_auto_update.start()
It takes only one of the very basic libraries.
import time
sleep_until = 'Mon Dec 25 06:00:00 2020' # String format might be locale dependent.
print("Sleeping until {}...".format(sleep_until))
time.sleep(time.mktime(time.strptime(sleep_until)) - time.time())
time.strptime() parses the time from string -> struct_time tuple. The string can be in different format, if you give strptime() parse-format string as a second argument. E.g.
time.strptime("12/25/2020 02:00AM", "%m/%d/%Y %I:%M%p")
time.mktime() turns the struct_time -> epoch time in seconds.
time.time() gives current epoch time in seconds.
Substract the latter from the former and you get the wanted sleep time in seconds.
sleep() the amount.
If you just want to sleep until whatever happens to be the next 2AM, (might be today or tomorrow), you need an if-statement to check if the time has already passed today. And if it has, set the wake up for the next day instead.
import time
sleep_until = "02:00AM" # Sets the time to sleep until.
sleep_until = time.strftime("%m/%d/%Y " + sleep_until, time.localtime()) # Adds todays date to the string sleep_until.
now_epoch = time.time() #Current time in seconds from the epoch time.
alarm_epoch = time.mktime(time.strptime(sleep_until, "%m/%d/%Y %I:%M%p")) # Sleep_until time in seconds from the epoch time.
if now_epoch > alarm_epoch: #If we are already past the alarm time today.
alarm_epoch = alarm_epoch + 86400 # Adds a day worth of seconds to the alarm_epoch, hence setting it to next day instead.
time.sleep(alarm_epoch - now_epoch) # Sleeps until the next time the time is the set time, whether it's today or tomorrow.
What about this handy and simple solution?
from datetime import datetime
import time
pause_until = datetime.fromisoformat('2023-02-11T00:02:00') # or whatever timestamp you gonna need
time.sleep((pause_until - datetime.now()).total_seconds())
from datetime import datetime
import time, operator
time.sleep([i[0]*3600 + i[1]*60 for i in [[H, M]]][0] - [i[0]*3600 + i[1]*60 for i in [map(int, datetime.now().strftime("%H:%M").split(':'))]][0])
Instead of using the wait() function, you can use a while-loop checking if the specified date has been reached yet:
if datetime.datetime.utcnow() > next_friday_10am:
# run thread or whatever action
next_friday_10am = next_friday_10am()
time.sleep(30)
def next_friday_10am():
for i in range(7):
for j in range(24):
for k in range(60):
if (datetime.datetime.utcnow() + datetime.timedelta(days=i)).weekday() == 4:
if (datetime.datetime.utcnow() + datetime.timedelta(days=i, hours=j)).hour == 8:
if (datetime.datetime.utcnow() + datetime.timedelta(days=i, hours=j, minutes=k)).minute == 0:
return datetime.datetime.utcnow() + datetime.timedelta(days=i, hours=j, minutes=k)
Still has the time-checking thread check the condition every after 30 seconds so there is more computing required than in waiting, but it's a way to make it work.
Since I'm new to Python, I need some advice from experienced people. What is the best way to run a Python method from time A to time B every T minutes using only core Python libraries?
To be more specific:
I need single threaded app which will start monitor timestamps of pair of files to make sure that the difference in file creation is always greater than 0. I need to run this monitor only from 9 to 6 every 2 minutes. I will take a look at schedule and time library...
You could:
Use cron (on *nix) or Windows task scheduler to run your script at a desired time.
It will make your solution both simpler and more robust.
Or
Run your script as a daemon and subscribe to file system events to monitor your files.
You could use pyinotify and the like depending on your OS. It provides the best reaction to changes time
Solutions based on time, threading, sched modules are more complex, harder to implement and less reliable.
At first thought something like this might work for you:
import time
# run every T minutes
T = 1
# run process for t seconds
t = 1.
while True:
start = time.time()
while time.time() < (start + t):
print 'hello world'
print 'sleeping'
# convert minutes to seconds and subtract the about of time the process ran
time.sleep(T*60-t)
But there might be a better way, knowing exactly what you're trying to accomplish
import time
#... initislize A, B and T here
time.sllep(max(0, A - time.time()) # wait for the A moment
while time.time() < B:
call_your_method()
time.sleep(T)
Is this what you are after?
import time
from datetime import datetime
def doSomething(t,a,b):
while True:
if a > b:
print 'The end date is less than the start date. Exiting.'
break
elif datetime.now() < a:
# Date format: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S
now = datetime.now()
wait_time = time.mktime(time.strptime(str(a),"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))-\
time.mktime(time.strptime(str(now), "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f"))
print 'The start date is',wait_time,'seconds from now. Waiting'
time.sleep(wait_time)
elif datetime.now() > b:
print 'The end date has passed. Exiting.'
break
else:
# do something, in this example I am printing the local time
print time.localtime()
seconds = t*60 # convert minutes to seconds
time.sleep(seconds) # wait this number of seconds
# date time format is year, month, day, hour, minute, and second
start_date = datetime(2012, 10, 10, 14, 38, 00)
end_date = datetime(2012, 10, 10, 14, 39, 00)
# do something every 2 minutes from the start to end dates
doSomething(2,start_date,end_date)
It will wait until the start date and run the function until the end date. There probably could be some additional error checking depending on what you are doing. Right now all it does is check for invalid entries such as a start date that is greater than an end date. All you have to do is specify the date and times. Hope this helps.
Edit:
Ah, I see you updated your question with additional requirements. This method probably won't work for you then.