Question

i was wondering if the solution for this documented here is still the solution or is there any other way getting an int from 4 bytes?

thank you.

EDIT: im getting the byte[] from sockets .read

EDIT: int recvMsgSize = in.read(Data, 0, BufferSize); if recvMsgSize is -1 i know the connection has been dropped.

how do i detect this when im using DataInputStream instead of InputStream?

thanks.

EDIT: apologies for being a yoyo regarding accepting the right answer. but after mihi’s updated final response, it would appear that the method is solid and cuts down extended coding and in my opinion best practice.

Answer 1

Depending on where you get those 4 bytes from:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/io/DataInput.html#readInt()

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/nio/ByteBuffer.html#getInt(int)

You can of course still do it manually, but in most cases using one of those (if you have to convert a byte array with lots of bytes, you might want to use a DataInputStream around a ByteArrayInputStream for example) is easier.

Edit: If you need to change the endianness, you will have to use a ByteBuffer, or reverse the bytes yourself, or do the conversion yourself, as DataInput does not support changing the endianness.

Edit2: When you get them from the socket input stream, I’d wrap that one into a DataInputStream and use it for reading all kinds of data. Especially since InputStream.read(byte[]) will not guarantee to fill the whole byte array… DataInputStream.readFully does.

DataInputStream in = new DataInputStream(socket.getInputStream());
byte aByte = in.readByte();
int anInt = in.readInt();
int anotherInt = in.readInt();
short andAShort = in.readShort(); // 11 bytes read :-)
byte[] lotOfBytes = new byte[anInt];
in.readFully(lotOfBytes);

Edit3: When reading multiple times from a stream, they will continue reading where you stopped, i. e. aByte will be byte 0, anInt will be bytes 1 to 4, anotherInt will be bytes 5 to 8, etc. readFully will read on after all that and will block until it has read lotOfbytes.

When the stream stops (the connection drops) you will get EOFException instead of -1, so if you get -1, the int really was -1.

If you do not want to parse any bytes at all, you can skip() them. Parsing one byte in 2 different ways is not possible with DataInputStream (i. e. read first an int from byte 0 to 3, then one from byte 2 to 5), but usually not needed either.

Example:

// read messages (length + data) until the stream ends:
while (true) {
int messageLength;
try {
    messageLength = in.readInt(); // bytes 0 to 3
} catch (EOFException ex) {
    // connection dropped, so handle it, for example
    return;
}
byte[] message = new byte[messageLength];
in.readFully(message);
// do something with the message.
}
// all messages handled.

Hope this answers your additional questions.