The time.sleep() function takes a float value (which represents the number of seconds) as an argument and causes a program to wait for a given number of seconds. After that time the next part of the code is going to be executed.
The following code causes a program to wait for 1.5 seconds.
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time.sleep(1.5) |
Simple wait
Let’s see how the sleep function works in practice.
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import time print('Hello!') seconds_to_wait = 3 time.sleep(seconds_to_wait) print('I waited ' + str(seconds_to_wait) + ' seconds to display this message.') |
This program will display “Hello”, and after 3 seconds it will display the next part of the message.
Hello! I waited 3 seconds to display this message.
Wait in a loop
The practical application of this function can be found in loops. You can use the while loop to display a message every n seconds.
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import time counter = 0 while True: counter += 1 time.sleep(3) print('Counter: ' + str(counter)) |
This code displays the message every 3 seconds and displays it to the output until you stop it, or the program crashes, etc.
Counter: 1 Counter: 2 Counter: 3 Counter: 4 Counter: 5
Adding randomness
Forcing a program to wait is very important in scraping. When you don’t want to be blocked or overload the server, you can use the wait function. But waiting for the n number of seconds each time is easily detectable, so randomness comes into play.
Waiting for 2, 4, or 6 seconds
Let’s modify the last part of the code, and make the program display the counter every 2, 4, and 6 seconds. Before we do that, we have to import the random module. It’s responsible for generating pseudo-random numbers.
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import time import random while True: seconds_to_wait = random.choice([2, 4, 6]) time.sleep(seconds_to_wait) print('I waited ' + str(seconds_to_wait) + ' seconds to display this message.') |
The program will wait every 2, 4, or 6 seconds.
I waited 2 seconds to display this message. I waited 6 seconds to display this message. I waited 4 seconds to display this message.
Set a range of times to wait
To set the minimum and maximum time to wait, we can use the randint function. The program will generate a random int between two ranges. In our case 1 and 10 seconds.
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import time import random while True: seconds_to_wait = random.randint(1, 10) time.sleep(seconds_to_wait) print('I waited ' + str(seconds_to_wait) + ' seconds to display this message.') |
The result of the program:
I waited 8 seconds to display this message. I waited 1 seconds to display this message. I waited 10 seconds to display this message.
Check how much time you waited
So far we set a time to wait. Let’s see how much time we had to wait for Python to finish the program. Let’s see how much we have to wait for the program to generate the Fibonacci sequence for different numbers.
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import time def fibonacci(n): if n == 1: return 0 elif n == 2: return 1 else: return fibonacci(n-1) + fibonacci(n-2) for i in [20, 25, 30, 35, 40]: start = time.time() fibonacci(i) print("Fib(%s): %.4f sec" % (i, time.time() - start)) |
On my computer, the program generated these responses:
Fib(20): 0.0020 sec Fib(25): 0.0290 sec Fib(30): 0.3140 sec Fib(35): 3.4409 sec Fib(40): 44.7275 sec