Question

Can somebody demonstrate how to send an array of bytes over a TCP connection from a sender program to a receiver program in Java.

byte[] myByteArray

(I’m new to Java programming, and can’t seem to find an example of how to do this that shows both ends of the connection (sender and receiver.) If you know of an existing example, maybe you could post the link. (No need to reinvent the wheel.) P.S. This is NOT homework! 🙂

Answer 1

The InputStream and OutputStream classes in Java natively handle byte arrays. The one thing you may want to add is the length at the beginning of the message so that the receiver knows how many bytes to expect. I typically like to offer a method that allows controlling which bytes in the byte array to send, much like the standard API.

Something like this:

private Socket socket;

public void sendBytes(byte[] myByteArray) throws IOException {
    sendBytes(myByteArray, 0, myByteArray.length);
}

public void sendBytes(byte[] myByteArray, int start, int len) throws IOException {
    if (len < 0)
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Negative length not allowed");
    if (start < 0 || start >= myByteArray.length)
        throw new IndexOutOfBoundsException("Out of bounds: " + start);
    // Other checks if needed.

    // May be better to save the streams in the support class;
    // just like the socket variable.
    OutputStream out = socket.getOutputStream(); 
    DataOutputStream dos = new DataOutputStream(out);

    dos.writeInt(len);
    if (len > 0) {
        dos.write(myByteArray, start, len);
    }
}

EDIT: To add the receiving side:

public byte[] readBytes() throws IOException {
    // Again, probably better to store these objects references in the support class
    InputStream in = socket.getInputStream();
    DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(in);

    int len = dis.readInt();
    byte[] data = new byte[len];
    if (len > 0) {
        dis.readFully(data);
    }
    return data;
}