Last few chars in a string sent over socket sometimes missing in Java network program

Question

Right now, I\'m trying to write a GUI based Java tic-tac-toe game that functions over a network connection. It essentially works at this point, however I have an intermittent er

Answer 1

As it turns out, the ready() method guaruntees only that the next read WON'T block. Consequently, !ready() does not guaruntee that the next read WILL block. Just that it could.

I believe that the problem here had to do with the TCP stack itself. Being stream-oriented, when bytes were written to the socket, TCP makes no guarantees as to the order or grouping of the bytes it sends. I suspect that the TCP stack was breaking up the sent string in a way that made sense to it, and that in the process, the ready() method must detect some sort of underlying break in the stream, and return false, in spite of the fact that more information is available.

I refactored the code to add a newline character to every message send, then simply performed a readLine() instead. This allowed my network protocol to be dependent on the newline character as a message delimiter, rather than the ready() method. I'm happy to say this fixed the problem.

Thanks for all your input!