What 0 returned by InputStream.read() means? How to handle this?

Question

What 0 (number of bytes read) returned by InputStream.read means? How to handle this situation?

Update: I mean read(byte[] b)

Answer 1

Take a look at the implementation of javax.sound.AudioInputStream#read(byte[] b, int off, int len) ... yuck. They completely violated the standard java.io.InputStream semantics and return a read size of 0 if you request fewer than a whole frame of data.

So unfortunately; the common advice (and api spec) should preclude having to deal with return of zero when len > 0 but even for JDK provided classes you can't universally rely on this to be true for InputStreams of arbitrary types.

Again, yuck.