Python threading.timer - repeat function every 'n' seconds

Question

I want to fire off a function every 0.5 seconds and be able to start and stop and reset the timer. I\'m not too knowledgeable of how Python threads work and am having diffic

Answer 1

Improving a little on Hans Then's answer, we can just subclass the Timer function. The following becomes our entire "repeat timer" code, and it can be used as a drop-in replacement for threading.Timer with all the same arguments:

from threading import Timer

class RepeatTimer(Timer):
    def run(self):
        while not self.finished.wait(self.interval):
            self.function(*self.args, **self.kwargs)

Usage example:

def dummyfn(msg="foo"):
    print(msg)

timer = RepeatTimer(1, dummyfn)
timer.start()
time.sleep(5)
timer.cancel()

produces the following output:

foo
foo
foo
foo

and

timer = RepeatTimer(1, dummyfn, args=("bar",))
timer.start()
time.sleep(5)
timer.cancel()

produces

bar
bar
bar
bar