It feels like it has been a lifetime since my last blog! I must apologize for the long delay, but between finding the time and finding a good topic to blog about, it's being difficult.
In today's article, it's been a while since I've needed to use either the setTimeout or setInterval functions and it seems many people are not familiar with the setInterval function.
Let's start by describing the two.
For example:
The above example will create an alert box with the message "Hello, World!" after 5 seconds.
setInterval is very similar to the above, the key difference is that it repeatedly runs the same Javascript at the specified time.
For example:
The above example will create an alert box with the message "Hello, World!" EVERY 5 seconds.
So, when should you use setTimeout and when should you use setInterval? Well, the answer is quite simple, if you just want to execute the code once, use setTimeout. If you want to execute the code repeatively, use setInterval.
No more setTimeout's that call a function and inside of that function another setTimeout call! Published on May 5, 2009 Tags: setTimeout()
| setInterval()
| JavaScript
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Jamie Munro is the author of ASP.NET MVC 5 with Bootstrap and Knockout.js,
Knockout.js: Building Dynamic Client-Side Web Applications,
20 Recipes for Programming MVC 3,
and 20 Recipes for Programming PhoneGap. He has been developing websites and web applications for over 20 years. Jamie began his writing career in 2009. As the success of Jamie's blog grew, he turned his writing passion to books about web development in hopes that his many years of experience could be passed on to his readers. No matter the programming language you're looking to learn, I've hopefully compiled an incredible set of tutorials for you to learn; whether you are beginner
or an expert, there is something for everyone to learn. Each topic I go in-depth and provide many examples throughout. I can't wait for you to dig in
and improve your skillset with any of the tutorials below.
setTimeout allows us to tell the user's browser to perform some Javascript in X milliseconds. The Javascript executed can be a function call, a single line of Javascript, etc...
setTimeout("alert('Hello, World!')", 5000);
setInterval("alert('Hello, World!')", 5000);
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