Paho MQTT Python client: get all messages and disconnect

Mosquitto MQTT Broker Community Q&A
1

Using the python paho mqtt client I want to get all messages in a given topic and disconnect from the broker.

I can easily do this using simple() as shown here, yet only if I specify the message count using msg_count. This would be fine if the message count were predictable or if there was a means to count the messages in a given topic (and I’m confident I’ve exhausted all options in doing that).

import paho.mqtt.subscribe as mqtt_subscribe
messages = mqtt_subscribe.simple('proxies/#', msg_count=4, hostname='mqtt.somewhere.io')
for m in messages:
 print(m.payload.decode())

I’m also able to get all the messages in my topic using the example shown in Getting Started. However, this uses a loop_forever() and I simply want to get all messages and disconnect. I’ve tried other loop*() functions, yet none are offering the results I’m seeking.

The Callback Example also returns all messages yet it isn’t clear to me how to disconnect from this.

And lastly, I can also use the mosquitto_sub client with a timeout to get all messages: mosquitto_sub -h mqtt.somewhere.io -t "proxies/#" -W 1 But I’d prefer to be consistent with the paho client and better understand it.