As I commented, use select.select
if your chat client is running in Unix.
For example:
import socket
import sys
import select
my_socket = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM)
my_socket.connect(("10.10.10.69",1234))
sys.stdout.write('your message: ')
sys.stdout.flush()
while True:
r, w, x = select.select([sys.stdin, my_socket], [], [])
if not r:
continue
if r[0] is sys.stdin:
message = raw_input()
if message == "quit":
my_socket.close()
break
my_socket.send(message)
sys.stdout.write('your message: ')
sys.stdout.flush()
else:
data = my_socket.recv(1024)
print "message from server:" , data