How to make a delay in the Python cycle

Learn how to create delays in Python with an example: add a timer to your for-loop for precise waits between iterations.

Delaying Loops in Python

Delaying a loop in Python is useful for many reasons. Whether you want to slow down a loop for debugging purposes, or you want to introduce a pause in your program to allow other processes to continue, you can achieve this with the time.sleep() function. The time.sleep() function takes one argument, which is the delay time in seconds. You can use it in a loop to delay the iteration by the specified amount of time. For example, you can create a loop that prints "Hello World!" every 10 seconds:

import time

while True:
    print("Hello World!")
    time.sleep(10)

In this code, we use an infinite while loop to continually print "Hello World!" and then use time.sleep() to delay the next iteration by 10 seconds. You can also use the time.sleep() function to delay the execution of a single statement. For example, if you want to delay the execution of a print statement for 5 seconds, you can do this:

import time

print("Hello World!")
time.sleep(5)

In this code, we print "Hello World!" and then delay the next statement by 5 seconds using time.sleep(). The time.sleep() function is particularly useful when you want to pause your program to allow other processes to continue. For example, if you are writing a program that needs to poll a remote server every 10 seconds, you can use time.sleep() to delay the execution of the polling code to ensure that it only runs once every 10 seconds.

import time

while True:
    # Poll the remote server
    # ...

    # Delay the loop by 10 seconds
    time.sleep(10)

In this code, we use a loop to continually poll the remote server, and then delay the next iteration by 10 seconds using time.sleep(). The time.sleep() function is a useful tool for delaying a loop or delaying the execution of a single statement in Python. It takes one argument, which is the delay time in seconds, and can be used to introduce a pause in your program to allow other processes to continue.