Perpetual timing

[Mark17]

As another use of a timer, I'm trying to do something like this:

import time

start = time.time()
y = input("What is 4 * 3?")
end = time.time()
while (end-start) < 4:
    if y=="12":
        end = time.time()
        print("it took", (end-start), "seconds")
    else: quit()

start = time.time()
z = input("What is 6 * 6?")

That is, wait until four seconds have elapsed before moving on if not input has been submitted.

Problem is the program stops and waits until input is submitted (when I did enter 12, I saw a running tab of elapsed time until four seconds... pretty cool!).

Is there a way to query continuously whether input has been submitted? If it hasn't then I would have it check time to see if four seconds have passed.

[Gribouillis]

Is there a way to query continuously whether input has been submitted?

I have a working solution in this post which uses the built-in selectors module.

[Mark17]

Is there a way to query continuously whether input has been submitted?

I have a working solution in this post which uses the built-in selectors module.

Is that OS specific? I run Windows 10 and I got a whole bunch of tracebacks:

C:\Users\drkle\Desktop\Desktop Transfer Material\Miscellaneous\Coursera\Python>timerprogram1.py
Enter passcode: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\drkle\Desktop\Desktop Transfer Material\Miscellaneous\Coursera\Python\timerprogram1.py", line 18, in <module>
main()
File "C:\Users\drkle\Desktop\Desktop Transfer Material\Miscellaneous\Coursera\Python\timerprogram1.py", line 10, in main
pairs = sel.select(timeout=5)
File "C:\Users\drkle\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\lib\selectors.py", line 323, in select
r, w, _ = self._select(self._readers, self._writers, [], timeout)
File "C:\Users\drkle\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\lib\selectors.py", line 314, in _select
r, w, x = select.select(r, w, w, timeout)
OSError: [WinError 10093] Either the application has not called WSAStartup, or WSAStartup failed

[Gribouillis]

Normally, the selectors module has been added to python precisely to write OS independent code. It means that it should work in Windows too. I cannot answer the issue that you're bringing about Windows because I don't know this OS well enough. From my search engine's results, it seems to me that it is not a Python issue. You could perhaps try the fix from this video.