Working with thread events in Python

I recently wrote a multithreaded download queue manager in Python. I had the actual file downloads running in its own thread. I only wanted the program to download during certain times of day, and decided to implement this functionality using thread events. I set up my threaded class method for downloading to accept a “stop_event” parameter.

def __download_files_thread(self, stop_event): while True: while not stop_event.is_set(): self.download_files()

I then instantiated an event and passed it into the thread upon creation.

dl_stop = threading.Event() self.__dl_thread = threading.Thread(target=self.__download_files_thread, args={dl_stop})

This allowed me to control the behavior of the thread and get it to not download files during certain times.

current_hour = time.strftime(“%H”) if int(current_hour) == self.__dl_start_hour: # Generate stop event dl_stop.set() elif int(current_hour) == self.__dl_end_hour: # Unset stop event dl_stop.clear()