Is it possible to add a timeout in try block in python

Question

I am trying to download a URL using python-wget downloaded from : https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wget

This package does not support a timeout option, hence it takes some time (around 10seconds) roughly for a query to fail. Is it possible to add a timeout in our try block to lessen the wait time for a function.

Something like this:

try(timeout=5s):
     wget.download(URL)
except:
    print "Query timed out"

It is not possible. Make sure that `download` function accepts timeout, or use multi-threads. — unalignedmemoryaccess, Aug 24 '17 at 09:08
No but, if all you want is a timeout, there are other ways: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492519/timeout-on-a-function-call — cs95, Aug 24 '17 at 09:10

freakish · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-24T09:19:31.047

4

The easiest way (i.e. if download doesn't support timeout and you can't modify the code) to achieve that is by running the code in another thread:

from threading import Thread

t = Thread(target=wget.download, args=(URL,))
t.daemon = True
t.start()
t.join(5)
if t.is_alive():
    print 'Timeout'

edited Aug 24 '17 at 09:19

answered Aug 24 '17 at 09:14

freakish

54,167
9
132
169

Wouldn't the code above require a continuous loop after the wget.download to check whether or not it had timed out? – brianlmerritt Mar 27 '20 at 07:52
@brianlmerritt sure. – freakish Mar 27 '20 at 07:58

Is it possible to add a timeout in try block in python

1 Answers1