Question

Couldn’t find this on stackoverflow and I did have an example of it which I’d written several months ago, but can’t find that either now.

Basically I’m sending byte[] from client to server, displaying it in server window, then planning to act on the data within. The data which I’m receiving, however, is not being cleaned each time, example:

I send “ABCDEF”
Server displays “ABCDEF”
I send “GHI”
Server displays “GHIDEF”

I think you can see where I’m coming from, I just need a method of cleaning the byte[] array, for this side of things.

The next step then would be to only read the bytes which I intend to use, so at the minute although I’m only using X amount of the data, I am actually receiving a LOT more data than I need to, and I need to now dispose of the extra data at the end.

Can anyone advise of how I can go about this?

My codes are below.

Client:

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {

        try
        {
            ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();
            Console.WriteLine("Welcome to Josh's humble server.");
            IPEndPoint ipEnd = new IPEndPoint(IPAddress.Any, 2000);
            Socket sock = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.IP);
            sock.Bind(ipEnd);
            sock.Listen(100);
            Socket clientSock = sock.Accept();
            byte[] mabytes = encoding.GetBytes("Test");
            clientSock.Send(mabytes);
            Console.WriteLine("Hmmm, data sent!");
            Console.ReadLine();
            Console.WriteLine(encoding.GetString(mabytes));
            Console.ReadLine();
            byte[] buffer = encoding.GetBytes("server message");
            while (true)
            {
                clientSock.Receive(buffer);
                Console.WriteLine(encoding.GetString(buffer));
            }


        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(Convert.ToString(ex));
            Console.ReadLine();
        }

    }

Server:

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();
        IPAddress ip = IPAddress.Parse("127.0.0.1");
        Console.WriteLine("Welcome to Josh's humble client.");
        Console.ReadLine();
        IPEndPoint ipEnd = new IPEndPoint(ip, 2000);
        Socket sock = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.IP);
        sock.Connect(ipEnd);
        while (true)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Please enter a message:\n");
            byte[] mabyte = encoding.GetBytes(Console.ReadLine());
            sock.Send(mabyte);
            Console.WriteLine("Sent Data");
        }
    }

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You use clientSock.Receive(buffer); to get data but never check the return value. It may read smaller then the length of buffer. A more correct way can be:

int len = clientSock.Receive(buffer);
Console.WriteLine(encoding.GetString(buffer,0,len));

Also using byte[] buffer = encoding.GetBytes("server message"); to allocate bytes is not a good way.
Use something like byte[] buffer = new byte[1024*N];

–EDIT–

Even this approach can be problematic when a multi-byte char is splitted between consecutive reads.
A better way can be using a TcpClient, wrapping its stream by new StreamReader(tcpClient.GetStream()) and read line by line