Chapter 19. Timeouts, IO and Idle Functions
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## Chapter 19. Timeouts, IO and Idle Functions

## 19.1. Timeouts

You may be wondering how you make GTK do useful work when in `main`(). Well, you have several options. Using the following gobject module function you can create a timeout function that will be called every "interval" milliseconds.

      source_id = gobject.timeout_add(interval, function, ...)

The `interval` argument is the number of milliseconds between calls to your function. The `function` argument is the callback you wish to have called. Any arguments after the second are passed to the function as data. The return value is an integer "source_id" which may be used to stop the timeout by calling:

      gobject.source_remove(source_id)

You may also stop the timeout callback function from being called again by returning zero or `FALSE` from your callback. If you want your callback to be called again, it should return `TRUE`.

Your callback should look something like this:

      def timeout_callback(...):

The number of arguments to the callback should match the number of data arguments specified in `timeout_add`().

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18.5. Widget Styles | Home | 19.2. Monitoring IO