My goal is writing a specific protocol. The data transfered between client and server are mixed with text and binary. I override the method dataReceived. When it get some new data, it will call a certain parseFunc according to the current state of the protocol, such as: Step 1: dataReceived will call parseGreetingMessage(), and then call ReplyGreetingMessage() Step 2: dataReceived will call parseHandShaking(), and then call ReplyHandShaking() Step 3: dataReceived will call parseSecurity(), and then call ReplySecurity() .... However, in some cases, the data received from the server is not completely fetched by the client, so the data passed to parseFunc will be treated as incomplete, and parseFunc will try to return and wait for more data. Currently, my code for doing this seems very ulgy ^_^. Could you please give me some suggestions to make the implementation of the "need more data" semantics more clearly and more easily? The problem is that the message boundary in my protocol is not as simple as LineReceiver. Each step, I should use different parse to determine whether I get the whole data. For example: parseErrorString: The data compose an leading 4byte integer size plus following string characters. If the length of collected data is shorter than (4 + size of string), it will be treated as incomplete. parseBitmap: The data compose a bitmap header and following bitmap data. If the length of collected data is shorter than (sizeof(header) + headerwidth*header.height*bits_per_pixel), it will be treated as incomplete. My method is: parseFunc parses the data while testing the completeness. If incomplete occrred, parseFunct return. When new data arrived, the dataReceived method will call parseFunc again, and "re-parse" the previous data as well as new data. However, sometimes, re-parse is time consuming. I want to find a way to hold the result for already-parsed data. Maybe it will be similar to "generator": # In class MyProtocol(protocol.Protocol): pseudo-code def parseFunc(...): # parse header ... if not completeness: yield # need more data, go into data waiting state. # If new data arrived, dataReceived will be called, and then # call parseFunc again to continue parsing. # parse following data... if not completeness: yield # need more data .... def dataReceived(s): self.data += s self.parseFunc() --- ShenLei