Question

I am writing a server application in Java. To read from the socket i have:

line = in.readLine();

where in is a BufferReader instance so i can read strings from the socket stream.

How can i change that to adopt my program to a non line-oriented protocol, where the end of each application-level message is supposded to be terminated by a special charachter, e.g. %, and not a newline charachter?

Answer 1

Use the read() method in a loop until the character is %. At each character, append it to a StringBuilder.

StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
for (int i = reader.read(); i >= 0; i = reader.read()) {
    char c = (char) i;
    if (c == '%') {
        break; // or consume the current builder, and recreate a new one
    }
    else {
        builder.append(c);
    }
}