Question

I have a server thats sending out data records as strings of varying length(for eg, 79,80,81,82)

I want to be able to receive exactly one record at a time.I’ve delimited records with a (r) but because I dont know howmany bytes I have to receive, It sometimes merges records and makes it difficult for me to process.

Answer 1

I have two ideas for you:

1. Use XML for the protocol. This way you know exactly when each message ends.
2. Send in the header of each “packet” the packet size, this way you know how much to read from the socket for this specific packet.

Edit:
Look at this dummy code for (2)

int buffer_size;
char* buffer;

read( socket, &buffer_size, sizeof(buffer_size)); 
buffer = (char*) malloc(packet_size);
read( socket, buffer, buffer_size );
// do something
free( buffer) ; 

EDIT:
I recommend looking at the comments here, as they note that the contect might not be ready by a simple “read()”, you need to keep “read()”ing, until you get the correct buffer size.

Also – you might not need to read the size. Basically you need to look for the ending top level tag of the XML. This can be done by parsing the whole XML, or parlty parsing the XML you get from the stream untill you have 0 nodes “open”.