In Python, how could I get a user input while simultaneously running the script?

In my program I am trying to take the chat from a webs开发者_StackOverflow中文版ite and printing it on my console. While that's going on I'm using raw_input to get chat from whoever is using it. My problem is that raw_input pauses the rest of the script until i say something or press enter. Is there a simple way to fix this?

You have to multithread. One thread for user input and another for the background tasks.

The documentation is a bit complex (I'm pretty confused by it), but it's a start: http://docs.python.org/library/threading.html

You may also want to look into the curses module: http://docs.python.org/library/curses.html