Develop Reference

Why can't I run this tcp client socket code without \n?

I was trying this code. it works fine but if I remove \n in String str it doesn't work I mean It was able to compile without \n but it didn't give me output.
public class Test {
// Use try-with-resources to close a socket.
public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {
int c;
// Create a socket connected to internic.net, port 43. Manage this
// socket with a try-with-resources block.
try (Socket s = new Socket("whois.internic.net", 43)) {
// Obtain input and output streams.
InputStream in = s.getInputStream();
OutputStream out = s.getOutputStream();
// Construct a request string.
String str = (args.length == 0 ? "MHProfessional.com" : args[0]) + "\n"; // <- herer
// Convert to bytes.
byte buf[] = str.getBytes();
// Send request.
out.write(buf);
// Read and display response.
while ((c = in.read()) != -1) {
System.out.print((char) c);
}
}
// The socket is now closed.
}
}

The server you're talking to reads data up until an end-of-line (\n) character -- that's just the way it works, but it's far from unusual. It's possible that other end-of-line sequences will be accepted as well.
The server has to have some way to know the client has finished sending data. It will probably know if the client closes its connection, but by then it's too late to respond to the client.

Use writeUTF and readUTF for http requests in Java

This is a a Java method that tries to crawl a designated web page. I am using writeUTF and readUTF for socket communications to a server.
static void get_html(String host, String page, int port) throws IOException {
Socket sock = new Socket(host, port);
String msg = MessageFormat.format("GET {0} HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: {1}\r\n\r\n", page, host);
DataOutputStream outToServer = new DataOutputStream(sock.getOutputStream());
DataInputStream inFromServer = new DataInputStream(sock.getInputStream());
InputStream stream = new ByteArrayInputStream(msg.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
BufferedReader buf = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(stream));
String outMsg;
while ((outMsg = buf.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println("Sending message: " + outMsg);
outToServer.writeUTF(outMsg);
String inMsg;
try {
inMsg = inFromServer.readUTF();
} catch (EOFException eof) {
break;
}
System.out.println(inMsg);
}
sock.close();
}
The reason I am writing it this way was to mimic the c code, where you have a while loop of send() making all deliveries from a buffer, and another while loop of recv() from a buffer untill it hits 'null'. When execute my code, it just hangs there, I suspect that is due to a call of readUTF before I finished sending all my messages. If this is the case, is there any way to fix it?

You can't do this. HTTP is defined as text lines. writeUTF() does not write text, it writes a special format starting with a 16-bit binary length word. Similarly the HTTP server won't reply with that format into your readUTF() call. See the Javadoc.
You have to use binary streams and the write() method, with \r\n as the line terminator. Depending on the output format you may or may not be able to use readLine(). Best not, then you don't have to write two pieces of code: use binary streams again.
In fact you should throw it all away and use HttpURLConnection. Implementing HTTP is not as simple as may hastily be supposed.

Reading all string from a server socket which has not been closed

I have a problem with socket programming in Java.
There is a server which has been written in python like this which I shouldn't not change.
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect((TCP_IP, TCP_PORT))
s.send('from server\nnewline\0')
data = s.recv(BUFFER_SIZE)
s.close()
Now I want to write a code in Java which read the string from a server. Something like this:
public static String readStr(Socket client) throws IOException {
InputStreamReader inStream = new InputStreamReader(
client.getInputStream());
BufferedReader inBuff = new BufferedReader(inStream);
String answer = new String();
String str = inBuff.readLine();
while (str!=null) {
answer = answer.concat(str + "\n");
str = inBuff.readLine();
}
answer = answer.substring(0, answer.length() - 1);
System.out.println("answer:\n "+answer);
return answer;
}
But it seems that it blocks at line str = inBuff.readLine(); at the last line of the message. I tried the read() method but it was blocked too.

When designing a protocol over tcp, the best way is to include some kind of framer. This is done in the current protocol by the usage of a NUL byte.
When reading the data from the socket, you should first divide it into blocks/frames by some operations, before parsing the individual blocks.
A crude way to divide the packets into blocks is reading until you find a NUL byte, then returning that block as a byte array. (This is not the most efficient implementation)
public byte[] readPacket(InputStream in) throws IOException {
ByteArrayOutputStream tempStr = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
int read;
read=in.read();
while(read > 0){
tempStr.write(read);
read=in.read();
}
if(read == -1)
throw new EOFException();
return tempStr.toByteArray();
}
Because you now have proper frames for your data, you can now easily read the data:
byte[] frame = readPacket(in);
String[] lines = new String(frame, StandardCharsets.UTF8).split("\n");
// Do something with the lines

This is probably because the last line sent by the server does not end and readLine() method only returns when it reaches end of the line. Since you change the server's code. I recommend you use another method for reading from the stream. You may also use InputStreamReader class.

Apart from already mentioned inconsistent message/line ending - once with \n, second with \0, at the server there is no detection of end of the message. So the server will loop as long as the socket is not closed (or shut down for writing) at the client side. And as you have this line before closing the socket:
data = s.recv(BUFFER_SIZE)
in other words the client is waiting for some response from the server. But the server is stuck forever reading the message from the client in a loop.
So you need to either close the socket prior to that recv call or send some message (like empty line) and detect in on the server and eventually exit the loop.

Getting end of Inputstream in java

following is my client side code , that retrieves text from server and prints.
Socket socket = new Socket(ip, port);
InputStream in = socket.getInputStream();
OutputStream out = socket.getOutputStream();
String string = "Hello!\n";
byte buffer[] = string.getBytes();
out.write(buffer);
while ((character = in.read()) != -1){
System.out.print((char) character);
}
I am getting the the correct values from the server , but it is happening again and again , how can i find out the length of the value sent.

-1 denotes the end of the stream, and is received when the connection is closed. If you want to keep the connection open and send multiple messages, you need some sort of protocol (kind of like agreement between both ends) that tells where the message ends. The are many ways to do this, but in your example you're writing a line terminator (\n) to the end of the message, so you could check for that at the other end. Another way is to write the amount of bytes you're about to send before the actual message contents.

Does Java´s BufferedReader leaves bytes in its internal buffer after a readline() call?

I´m having a problem, in my server, after I send a file with X bytes, I send a string saying this file is over and another file is coming, like
FILE: a SIZE: Y\r\n
send Y bytes
FILE a FINISHED\r\n
FILE b SIZE: Z\r\n
send Z byes
FILE b FINISHED\r\n
FILES FINISHED\r\n
In my client it does not recive properly.
I use readline() to get the command lines after reading Y or Z bytes from the socket.
With one file it works fine, with multiple files it rarely works (yeah, I dont know how it worked once or twice)
Here are some code I use to transfer binary
public static void readInputStreamToFile(InputStream is, FileOutputStream fout,
long size, int bufferSize) throws Exception
{
byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferSize];
long curRead = 0;
long totalRead = 0;
long sizeToRead = size;
while(totalRead < sizeToRead)
{
if(totalRead + buffer.length <= sizeToRead)
{
curRead = is.read(buffer);
}
else
{
curRead = is.read(buffer, 0, (int)(sizeToRead - totalRead));
}
totalRead = totalRead + curRead;
fout.write(buffer, 0, (int) curRead);
}
}
public static void writeFileInputStreamToOutputStream(FileInputStream in, OutputStream out, int bufferSize) throws Exception
{
byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferSize];
int count = 0;
while((count = in.read(buffer)) != -1)
{
out.write(buffer, 0, count);
}
}
just for note I could solve replacing readline to this code:
ByteArrayOutputStream ba = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
int ch;
while(true)
{
ch = is.read();
if(ch == -1)
throw new IOException("Conecção finalizada");
if(ch == 13)
{
ch = is.read();
if(ch == 10)
return new String(ba.toByteArray(), "ISO-8859-1");
else
ba.write(13);
}
ba.write(ch);
}
PS: "is" is my input stream from socket: socket.getInputStream();
still I dont know if its the best implementation to do, im tryinf to figure out

There's no readLine() calls in the code here, but to answer your question; Yes, calling BufferedReader.readLine() might very well leave stuff around in its internal buffer. It's buffering the input.
If you wrap one of your InputStream in a BufferedReader, you can't really get much sane behavior if you read from the BufferedReader and then later on read from the InputStream.
You could read bytes from your InputStream and parse out a text line from that by looking for a pair of \r\n bytes. When you got a line saying "FILE: a SIZE: Y\r\n" , you go on as usual, except the buffer you used to parse lines might contain the first few bytes of your file, so write those bytes out first.
Or you use the idea of FTP and use one TCP stream for commands and one TCP stream for the actual transfer, reading from the command stream with a BufferedReader.readLine(), and reading the data as you already do with an InputStream.

Yes, the main point of a BufferedReader is to buffer the data. It is reading input from its underlying Reader in bigger chunks to avoid having multiple small reads.
That it has a readLine() method is just a nice bonus which is made easily possible by the buffering.
You may want to use a DataInputStream (on top of a BufferedInputStream) and it's readLine() method, if you really have to mix text and binary data over the same connection - read the data from the same DataInputStream. (But take care about the encoding here.)

Call flush() on the OutputStream after you've written data that you want to be certain has been sent. So essentially at the end of each file call flush().

I guess you must flush your output stream in order to make sure any buffered bytes are properly sent down the stream. Closing the stream will equally have this process run.
The Javadocs for flush say:
Flushes this output stream and forces
any buffered output bytes to be
written out. The general contract of
flush is that calling it is an
indication that, if any bytes
previously written have been buffered
by the implementation of the output
stream, such bytes should immediately
be written to their intended
destination.