How would you be able to move to the next iteration of a for loop if a given iteration takes more than a certain amount of time? The code should look something like this.
for i in range(0, max_iterations):
timer function
call to api
The timer function will serve the purpose of forcing the for loop to continue onto the next iteration if the api has not finished. It should work in 120 seconds for that iteration. How would the timer function be written? Thank you in advance!
This is only truly possible with a non-blocking API call or an API call with a timeout. For example, if you are using the socket library, you could use socket.setblocking(0)to make the socket API calls non-blocking.
In your case, you have said you are using the Yandex API. This appears to be JSON over https, so you may wish to try urllib2.urlopen(). This method accepts a timeout. This is even easier than using a non-blocking call as urlopen() will simply give up and return an error after the timeout has expired.
Using threads as suggested in some of the comments will give you a partial solution. Since there is no ability to stop a thread started with the threading module, all of the API calls you initiate that do not complete will stay in a blocked state for the life of the python interpreter and those threads will never exit.
If you do use the threading module to solve this problem, you should make all of the threads that run API calls daemon threads thread.setDaemon(True) so that when your main thread exits, the interpreter stops. Otherwise the interpreter will not exit until all of the API calls have completed and returned.