[Nathan King]

While working through long exercise at the end of chapter 2, I noticed that due to the positioning of the time.sleep(900) - the program waits 15 minutes before attempting to retrieve the price.

import urllib.request
import time

price = 99.99
while price > 4.74:
    time.sleep(900)
    page = urllib.request.urlopen("http://www.beans-r-us.biz/prices.html")
    text = page.read().decode("utf8")
    where = text.find('>$')
    start_of_price = where + 2
    end_of_price = start_of_price + 4
    price = float(text[start_of_price:end_of_price])
print ("Buy!")

Shouldn't time.sleep(900) appear at the end of the loop so the program immediately retrieves a price to check if another iteration of the loop is actually needed?

import urllib.request
import time

price = 99.99
while price > 4.74:
    page = urllib.request.urlopen("http://www.beans-r-us.biz/prices.html")
    text = page.read().decode("utf8")
    where = text.find('>$')
    start_of_price = where + 2
    end_of_price = start_of_price + 4
    price = float(text[start_of_price:end_of_price])
    time.sleep(900)
print ("Buy!")

Just wondering about the positioning of the .sleep delay.

This post has been edited by Nathan King: 06 February 2012 - 01:55 AM

[xxViennaxx]

Your code is just more effective than the one in the book. Good job!!!