Overview

waiting is a small library for waiting for stuff to happen. It basically waits for a function to return True, in various modes.

Waiting is compatible with flux for simulated timelines.

Usage

The most basic usage is when you have a function you want to wait for:

>>> predicate = lambda : True

Waiting forever is very simple:

>>> from waiting import wait, TimeoutExpired
>>> wait(predicate)
True

If your predicate returns a value, it will be returned as the result of wait():

>>> result = object()
>>> wait(lambda: result) is result
True

A timeout parameter can also be specified:

>>> wait(predicate, timeout_seconds=10.5)
True

When a timeout expires without the predicate being fullfilled, an exception is thrown:

>>> try:
...     wait(lambda : False, timeout_seconds=0)
... except TimeoutExpired:
...     # expired!
...     pass
... else:
...     assert False

Sleeping polls the predicate at a certain interval (by default 1 second). The interval can be changed with the sleep_seconds argument:

>>> wait(predicate, sleep_seconds=20)
True

When waiting for multiple predicates, waiting provides two simple facilities to help aggregate them: ANY and ALL. They resemble Python’s built-in any() and all(), except that they don’t call a predicate once it has been satisfied (this is useful when the predicates are inefficient and take time to complete):

>>> from waiting import wait, ANY, ALL
>>> wait(ANY([predicate, predicate]))
True
>>> wait(ALL([predicate, predicate]))
True

TimeoutExpired exceptions, by default, don’t tell you much about what didn’t happen that you were expecting. To fix that, use the waiting_for argument:

>>> try:
...     wait(lambda : False, timeout_seconds=0, waiting_for="something that will never happen") #doctest: +ELLIPSIS
... except TimeoutExpired as e:
...     print(e)
Timeout of 0 seconds expired waiting for something that will never happen

Exponential backoff is supported for the sleep interval:

>>> from waiting import wait
>>> wait(predicate, sleep_seconds=(1, 100)) # sleep 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 100, 100, ....
True
>>> wait(predicate, sleep_seconds=(1, 100, 3)) # sleep 1, 3, 9, 27, 81, 100, 100, 100 ....
True
>>> wait(predicate, sleep_seconds=(1, None)) # sleep 1, 2, 4, 6, .... (infinity)
True
>>> wait(predicate, sleep_seconds=(1, None, 4)) # sleep 1, 4, 16, 64, ... (infinity)
True

If your predicate might raise certain exceptions you wish to ignore, you may use expected_exceptions to ignore them:

>>> from waiting import wait
>>> wait(predicate, expected_exceptions=ValueError)
True
>>> wait(predicate, expected_exceptions=(ValueError, AttributeError))
True