How to output while waiting for a character input in Python 3?

Question

I want to make a timer which requiers space press to stop it. I also want to print out how much time has passed since the start of the loop. I tried this:

import msvcrt
import time

print("Press space")
start_time = time.time()
while True:
    # print how much time has passed
    print(start_time - time.time(), end='\r')

    # break the loop if space btn was pressed
    if msvcrt.getch() == b" ":
        break

But the problem is that the time passed will be printed only if I pressed a key, and I want it to print out continuesly. I tried this solution from https://stackoverflow.com/a/22391379/12132452, but because it was python 2, i kept getting this error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "f:/Projects/Python/test.py", line 9, in <module>
    if sys.stdin in select.select([sys.stdin], [], [], 0)[0]:
OSError: [WinError 10093] Either the application has not called WSAStartup, or WSAStartup failed

What do I need to do?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 22 '20 at 21:51

1

This might help:

import sys
import keyboard
import time

print("Press space")
start_time = time.time()
while True:
    try:

        print(start_time - time.time(), end='\r')
        if keyboard.is_pressed('SPACE'):
            print("\nyou pressed SPACE, exiting...")
            sys.exit()
    except:
        break

answered Jun 22 '20 at 21:51

JaniniRami

493
3
11

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'keyboard' – Alex_Joo Jun 22 '20 at 21:58
Install it with python -m pip install keyboard – JaniniRami Jun 22 '20 at 21:59

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 22 '20 at 22:05

I know this question was answered, but here is another way of doing it in pygame:

import pygame
import time

pygame.init()

wn = pygame.display.set_mode((500, 500))
pygame.display.set_caption('Timer')

start_time = time.time()

def main():
    running = True
    fps = 60
    clock = pygame.time.Clock()
    
    while running:
        clock.tick(fps)


        for event in pygame.event.get():
            if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
                running = False
        
        keys = pygame.key.get_pressed()
        if keys[pygame.K_SPACE]:
            print(time.time() - start_time)
            running = False
        
        pygame.display.update()

main()

Also, to install pygame open a terminal and type:

python -m pip install pygame==1.9.6

How to output while waiting for a character input in Python 3?

2 Answers2