python - timed user input

Question

Under certain time I need user to input some specific sentence.

For example, user should write below sentence under 10 seconds:

Hello! World.

However, if user is unable to finish complete sentence then whatever one wrote should be accepted. So, if one is able to write only Hello! Wo then it should be stored.

Problem - If user doesn't hit Return/Enter before time then nothing is saved. How to overcome this? Here's my approach -

import time
from threading import Thread

print('Hello! World')
user = None

def check():
    time.sleep(10)
    if user != None:
        return
    print ("Too Slow")

Thread(target = check).start()

user = input("Enter above string: \n")

Check this out: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3523174/raw-input-in-python-without-pressing-enter — F. Leone, Aug 24 '17 at 10:24

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 24 '17 at 10:33

3

I would take a different approach (that doesn't require threading); I would save the current dat end time just before you print "hello world" and then compare the current time afterwards.

from datetime import datetime, timedelta

start = datetime.now()
print("Hello world!")
if input() == "Hellow world!" and datetime.now()<=start + timedelta(seconds = 10):
    #the user got it right
else:
    #the user was either too slow or got it wrong

answered Aug 24 '17 at 10:33

Treehee

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I need to halt user at the exact specified time otherwise your approach could have been useful. – sync11 Aug 24 '17 at 10:36
Then you can't really use input() – Treehee Aug 24 '17 at 11:00
maybe try using pygame for this sort of thing ;) – Treehee Aug 24 '17 at 11:00
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25494726/how-to-use-pygame-keydown https://www.pygame.org/docs/ref/key.html – Treehee Aug 24 '17 at 11:03
useful links ;) – Treehee Aug 24 '17 at 11:03
how to create a pygame window; http://www.petercollingridge.co.uk/pygame-physics-simulation/creating-pygame-window – Treehee Aug 24 '17 at 11:05
displaying text in pygame; https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10077644/python-display-text-w-font-color – Treehee Aug 24 '17 at 11:05

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 24 '17 at 11:20

To do so you'd have to create your own window with your very own event handler that would detect whenever the user hit a key on his keyboard. Standard input() method or even customized textControl widgets in wxPython are cool, but always waits till user has hit the Enter key. So i unfortunately think that you'd have to use some GUI library (such as wxpython, which comes up with your OS's native look and a bunch of useful widgets), and take care of event handling by itself. If you'd rather implement a timeout than that GUI, you could run user input in one thread and immediately start the second one with the timer. Then write a handler that'd kill the inputThread when the timer finished and vice versa. Hope i helped :)

python - timed user input

2 Answers2