Question

I’m trying to read a JSON-encoded byte from a server, which will be indented, but of an unpredictable length, and no obvious termination byte. I would like to read the entire server response into a byte. The server will close the connection. Is it possible to do this using net?

Answer 1

As a supplement to @minikomi ‘s answer, I would like to add that, if you are sure that the bytes returned from the server are JSON encoded, there’s a nice package encoding/json for this.

http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/

If you are using a decoder to decode directly from a connection, sometimes the error won’t be returned. You might want to use fmt.Printf("%v\n", whateverDecodedFromTheConnection) to see what the decoder gets for your struct when the connection is closed.

For example, in my case, where the encoding/gob decoder is used to decode a message from a tcp connection into a struct defined as:

type MessageType struct {
    Type uint8
}

When the connection is closed, decoder.Decode(&buffer) returns {0}. This might not be a common situation, but something needed to be watched out.