scheduler or infinite loop

[John Nagle]

On 9/29/2010 4:59 AM, harryos wrote:
> hi
> I am trying to write a program to read data from a site url.
> The program must read the data from site every 5 minutes.
>
> def get_data_from_site(pageurlstr):
>      h=urllib.urlopen(pageurlstr)
>      data=h.read()
>      process_data(data)

    A key point here is that you're not handling network
failures.  The first time you have a brief network
outage, your program will fail.

    Consider something like this:



def get_data_from_site(pageurlstr):
     try :
         h=urllib.urlopen(pageurlstr)
         data=h.read()
     except EnvironmentError as message :
	print("Error reading %s from network at %s: %s" %
		(pageurlstr, time.asctime(), str(message))
         return(False)
     process_data(data)
     return(True)


lastpoll = 0  # time of last successful read
POLLINTERVAL = 300.0
RETRYINTERVAL = 30.0
while True:
     status = get_data_from_site('http://somesite.com/')
     if not status : # if fail
	time.sleep(RETRYINTERVAL) # try again soon
         print("Retrying...")
	continue
     now = time.time() # success
     # Wait for the next poll period.  Compensate for how
     # long the read took.
     waittime = max(POLLINTERVAL - (now - lastpoll), 1.0)
     lastpoll = now
     time.sleep(waittime)