How to Pause Javascript Code Execution for 2 Seconds [Duplicate]

Javascript is single-threaded, so by nature there should not be a sleep function because sleeping will block the thread. setTimeout is a way to get around this by posting an event to the queue to be executed later without blocking the thread. But if you want a true sleep function, you can write something like this:

function sleep(miliseconds) {
   var currentTime = new Date().getTime();

   while (currentTime + miliseconds >= new Date().getTime()) {
   }
}

Note: The above code is NOT recommended.

There's no (safe) way to pause execution. You can, however, do something like this using setTimeout:

function writeNext(i)
{
    document.write(i);

    if(i == 5)
        return;

    setTimeout(function()
    {
        writeNext(i + 1);

    }, 2000);
}

writeNext(1);

You can use setTimeout to do this

function myFunction() {
    // your code to run after the timeout
}

// stop for sometime if needed
setTimeout(myFunction, 2000);

This Link might be helpful for you.

Every time I've wanted a sleep in the middle of my function, I refactored to use a setTimeout().

There's no way to stop execution of your code as you would do with a procedural language. You can instead make use of setTimeout and some trickery to get a parametrized timeout:

for (var i = 1; i <= 5; i++) {
    var tick = function(i) {
        return function() {
            console.log(i);
        }
    };
    setTimeout(tick(i), 500 * i);
}

Demo here: