Question

I am using the code provided by this accepted answer to send a list of files over a socket in Java. My goal is to be receiving a list of images. What I would like to do is read these images directly into memory as BufferedImages before writing them to disk. However, my first attempts, which was to use ImageIO.read(bis) (again, see the attached question) failed, as it attempted to continue reading beyond the end of the first image file.

My current idea is to write the data from the socket to a new output stream, then read that stream from an intput stream that is passed to ImageIO.read(). This way, I can write it byte by byte as the program is currently doing, but send it to the BufferedImage rather than the file. however I’m not sure how to link the output stream to an input stream.

Can anyone recommend simple edits to the code above, or provide another method of doing this?

Answer 1

In order to read the image before writing it to disk, you’ll need to use a ByteArrayInputStream. http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/io/ByteArrayInputStream.html

Basically, it creates a inputstream that reads from a specified byte array. So, you’d read the image length, then it’s name, then the length-amount of bytes, create the ByteArrayInputStream, and pass it to ImageIO.read

Example snippet:

long fileLength = dis.readLong();
String fileName = dis.readUTF();
byte[] bytes = new byte[fileLength];
dis.readFully(bytes);
BufferedImage bimage = ImageIO.read(new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes));

Or using the code from the other answer you cited:

String dirPath = ...;

ServerSocket serverSocket = ...;
Socket socket = serverSocket.accept();

BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(socket.getInputStream());
DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(bis);

int filesCount = dis.readInt();
File[] files = new File[filesCount];

for(int i = 0; i < filesCount; i++)
{
    long fileLength = dis.readLong();
    String fileName = dis.readUTF();
    byte[] bytes = new byte[fileLength];
    dis.readFully(bytes);
    BufferedImage bimage = ImageIO.read(new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes));

    //do some shit with your bufferedimage or whatever

    files[i] = new File(dirPath + "/" + fileName);

    FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(files[i]);
    BufferedOutputStream bos = new BufferedOutputStream(fos);

    bos.write(bytes, 0, fileLength);

    bos.close();
}

dis.close();