Correct way to pause a Python program

So, I found this to work very well in my coding endeavors. I simply created a function at the very beginning of my program,

def pause():
    programPause = raw_input("Press the <ENTER> key to continue...")

and now I can use the pause() function whenever I need to just as if I was writing a batch file. For example, in a program such as this:

import os
import system

def pause():
    programPause = raw_input("Press the <ENTER> key to continue...")

print("Think about what you ate for dinner last night...")
pause()

Now obviously this program has no objective and is just for example purposes, but you can understand precisely what I mean.

NOTE: For Python 3, you will need to use input as opposed to raw_input


It seems fine to me (or raw_input() in Python 2.X). Alternatively, you could use time.sleep() if you want to pause for a certain number of seconds.

import time
print("something")
time.sleep(5.5)    # Pause 5.5 seconds
print("something")

For Windows only, use:

import os
os.system("pause")

Tags:

Python

Sleep