How to add a function to discord.py event loop?

Question

I am using Python with discord.py. Documentation here

I've got a bot that is running on a Discord server that links the server with a subreddit. Users have various commands that do things like getting the top submissions, getting the latest submissions, and so on.

I want to add some features to the bot, with one of them being a keyword notifier. The bot should search the subreddit for keywords in the title, and then notify users if they are on the list for that keyword. I know how to do this, I've done it plenty of times, but I don't know how to do it with a Discord bot. I have no experience with asynchio or any kind of asynchronous programming.

The way I've tried to do it works, but it is very janky and definitely not good. At the top of the on message() function, I just add a call to the search_submissions() function, so that whenever someone puts sends a new message on the server, the bot will scan the Reddit submissions. The server is busy enough that this would work relatively okay, but I really want to do it the "proper" way.

I don't know how to call the search_submissions() function without putting it inside of on_message().

---

Edit for extra code:

import discord

TOKEN = "redacted"
client = discord.Client()

@client.event
async def reddit_search():
    print("Searching")

@client.event
async def on_message(message):
    if message.content.startswith("reddit!hot"):
        # Get hot
    # Do other things.

@client.event
async def on_ready():
    print("Connected to Discord as {}.".format(client.user.name))

client.run(TOKEN)

Answer 1

You can add a function to the bot event loop with Client.loop.create_task(search_submissions()) like this:

async def search_submissions():
    pass

client = discord.Client()

client.loop.create_task(search_submissions())
client.run(TOKEN)

Update:

If you want your function to continue working you can put it in a while loop with some sleeping in between:

async def search_submissions():
    while(true):
        # do your stuff
        await asyncio.sleep(1)