How to use asynchronous coroutines like a generator? - asynchronous

Question

I want develop a web-socket watcher in python in such a way that when I send sth then it should wait until the response is received (sort of like blocking socket programming) I know it is weird, basically I want to make a command line python 3.6 tool that can communicate with the server WHILE KEEPING THE SAME CONNECTION LIVE for all the commands coming from user.
I can see that the below snippet is pretty typical using python 3.6.
import asyncio
import websockets
import json
import traceback
async def call_api(msg):
async with websockets.connect('wss://echo.websocket.org') as websocket:
await websocket.send(msg)
while websocket.open:
response = await websocket.recv()
return (response)
print(asyncio.get_event_loop().run_until_complete(call_api("test 1")))
print(asyncio.get_event_loop().run_until_complete(call_api("test 2")))
but this will creates a new ws connection for every command which defeats the purpose. One might say, you gotta use the async handler but I don't know how to synchronize the ws response with the user input from command prompt.
I am thinking if I could make the async coroutine (call_api) work like a generator where it has yield statement instead of return then I probably could do sth like beow:
async def call_api(msg):
async with websockets.connect('wss://echo.websocket.org') as websocket:
await websocket.send(msg)
while websocket.open:
response = await websocket.recv()
msg = yield (response)
generator = call_api("cmd1")
cmd = input(">>>")
while cmd != 'exit'
result = next(generator.send(cmd))
print(result)
cmd = input(">>>")
Please let me know your valuable comments.
Thank you

Answer 1

This can be achieved using an asynchronous generator (PEP 525).
Here is a working example:
import random
import asyncio
async def accumulate(x=0):
while True:
x += yield x
await asyncio.sleep(1)
async def main():
# Initialize
agen = accumulate()
await agen.asend(None)
# Accumulate random values
while True:
value = random.randrange(5)
print(await agen.asend(value))
asyncio.run(main())