Question

I want to do something like this:

// Implement an interruptible read
for(;;) {
  if (input.available() > 0)
    buffer.append(input.read());
  else if (input.eof())
    return buffer;
  else
    Thread.sleep(250);
}

If I didn’t care about blocking, I would have done this:

for(;;) {
  c = input.read();
  if (c != -1)
    buffer.append(c);
  return buffer;
}

But I do care, so I need to use available(), so how can I determine EOF?

Answer 1

You could always use the NIO library instead, as that provides non-blocking IO (as the name suggests). There’s an Oracle blog post about IO vs NIO: Here.

Alternatively there are some code examples provided Here about setting timeout parameters on the read from an InputStream