Ruby gets wait 2 seconds and then set the value

Question

What I'm trying to do is use the gets feature of ruby.

should_i_wait = gets

However I don't want to stop the program for eternity if the user doesn't enter anything. I want the boolean variable to be set to true if after 2 seconds the user didn't enter anything. Is there a simple way to do this? Is there a lovely gem out there ?

Answer 1

You can use Timeout to achieve this:

require 'timeout'
begin
  should_i_wait = Timeout::timeout(2) do
    gets
  end
rescue Timeout::Error
  should_i_wait = true
end
puts should_i_wait