C# Begin/EndReceive - how do I read large data?

Question

When reading data in chunks of say, 1024, how do I continue to read from a socket that receives a message bigger than 1024 bytes until there is no data left? Should I just u

Answer 1

This a very old topic, but I got here looking for something else and found this:

Now this corrected works fine most of the time, but it fails when the packet's size is a multiple of the buffer. The reason for this is if the buffer gets filled on a read it is assumed there is more data; but the same problem happens as before. A 2 byte buffer, for exmaple, gets filled twice on a 4 byte packet, and assumes there is more data. It then blocks because there is nothing left to read. The problem is that the receive function doesn't know when the end of the packet is.

I had this same problem, and since none of the replies seems to solve this, the way I did it was using Socket.Available

public static void Read_Callback(IAsyncResult ar)
{
    StateObject so = (StateObject) ar.AsyncState;
    Socket s = so.workSocket;

    int read = s.EndReceive(ar);    
    if (read > 0) 
    {
        so.sb.Append(Encoding.ASCII.GetString(so.buffer, 0, read));

        if (s.Available == 0)
        {
            // All data received, process it as you wish
        }
    }
    // Listen for more data
    s.BeginReceive(so.buffer, 0, StateObject.BUFFER_SIZE, 0, 
                new AyncCallback(Async_Send_Receive.Read_Callback), so);
}

Hope this helps others, SO have helped me many times, thank you all!