Non-Blocking raw_input() in python

Question

After digging around in SO for a while, I still haven\'t found a good answer to what I would hope is a fairly common need. Basically I need a main thread to do \"stuff\" unt

Answer 1

If you actually want to keep the while loop going on forever, you will need to create a new thread and start it, each time the old one has finished.

I updated the example in the question to make that work:

import threading
import time

kbdInput = ''
playingID = ''
finished = True

def kbdListener():
    global kbdInput, finished
    kbdInput = raw_input("> ")
    print "maybe updating...the kbdInput variable is: {}".format(kbdInput)
    finished = True

while True:
    print "kbdInput: {}".format(kbdInput)
    print "playingID: {}".format(playingID)
    if playingID != kbdInput:
        print "Received new keyboard Input. Setting playing ID to keyboard input value"
        playingID = kbdInput
    else:
        print "No input from keyboard detected. Sleeping 2 seconds"
    if finished:
        finished = False
        listener = threading.Thread(target=kbdListener)
        listener.start()
    time.sleep(2)