How do I time how long a user takes to type input?

Question

I'm making a game in Python and I need to find how long it takes for a user to enter their response to a prompt. I would then like to have the input stored in a variable.

I have already tried using the timeit module with no success:

import timeit
def get_input_from_user():
    variable = input("Prompt: ")
time_to_respond = timeit.timeit(get_input_from_user())

This code gives the following ValueError :

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\lib\timeit.py", line 232, in timeit
    return Timer(stmt, setup, timer, globals).timeit(number)
  File "C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\lib\timeit.py", line 128, in __init__
    raise ValueError("stmt is neither a string nor callable")
ValueError: stmt is neither a string nor callable

Is there another way of going about this? Thank you!

Answer 1

Using timeit , you can check how much time an expression takes using:

time_to_respond = timeit.timeit(get_input_from_user, number=1)

Note, no parentheses, and the argument number=1 , to make sure that it only gets called once.

For example, this could return:

>>> time_to_respond
1.66159096399997

But since you want access to both the variable and the time to respond, I would suggest doing something along these lines instead, using the time module:

import time
def get_input_from_user():
    s = time.time()
    variable = input("Prompt: ")
    e = time.time()
    return e-s, variable

time_to_respond, variable = get_input_from_user()

>>> time_to_respond
2.4452149868011475
>>> variable
'hello!'