How to continue a code while a loop is already running

Question

I created a code that shows a real time clock at the beginning (works by a loop and refreshing itself in every 1 sec using \r ) But I want to run the rest of the code while the clock is ticking (continuously). But this isn't going any further while the loop is running. I think there is no need to write the code of the clock.

Answer 1

If you want to have a task running, while using another you can use multi-threading. This means you tell your processor two different tasks and it will be continued as long as you tell it to work. See here a post about multithreading and multiprocessing. You can use the thread function of python for this.

Here a small example:

import threading
import time
# Define a function for the thread
def print_time( threadName, delay):
   count = 0
   while count < 10:
      time.sleep(delay)
      count += 1
      print ("%s: %s" % ( threadName, time.ctime(time.time()) ))

def counter(threadName, number_of_counts, delay):
    count=0
    while count < number_of_counts:
        print ("%s: %s" % ( threadName, count))
        time.sleep(delay)
        count +=1
# Create two threads as follows
threading.Thread(target=print_time, args=("Thread-1", 1, )).start()
threading.Thread(target=counter, args=("Thread-2", 100, 0.1,)).start()

for further information check the documentation. Note that thread has been renamed to _thread in python 3