tcp socket programming

[Mohammed Smadi]

On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, Irmen de Jong wrote:

> Mohammed Smadi wrote:
> > hi;
> > If i have a tcp connection with a remote server, what is a good way to 
> > read all the data into a buffer before starting to process the data?
> > I know that the data recieved will be 3 lines with CRLF between them.  
> > However if I can sock.recv(1024) the output is not consistent all the 
> > time, sometime i get one line and sometimes i get two.  So I figures I 
> > should read all the data first then work on it and I used the following 
> > code:
> > result = []
> > while True:
> >     got=s.recv(1024)
> >     print got
> >     if not got: break
> >     result.append(got)
> >     got = [] # i tried also taking this out
> > s.close()
> > 
> > but this code just hangs in the loop and never quits
> 
> ... because it doesn't 'know' when to stop reading.
> The socket recv() returns anything from 0 to 1024 bytes
> depending on the amount of data that is available at that time.
> 
> You have to design your wire protocol a bit differently if you want
> to do this in a consistent, reliable way.
> For instance, you can decide on sending *one* byte first that
> signifies the amount of bytes to read after that. (limiting the
> size to 255 ofcourse).
> 
> Or you will have to change your read-loop to read until it
> encountered the third CRLF occurrence (and no more!)
> 
> The latter is actually quite easily done by not reading directly
> from the socket object, but first converting it to a file-like
> object:
> 
> s=socket.socket(....)
> s.connect(...)
> 
> fs=s.makefile()
> fs.readline()
> fs.readline()
> fs.readline()
> 
> 
> --Irmen.
> 
that seems to have worked.  I need to do more testing.  Thanks