Trying to read from a socket character by character

Question

Hi all,
I have a problem with reading from a socket character by character. In the code shown below I try and read each character, and then write it to a file. The information sent to a socket sent from a file, and EOF is marked with character of ascii code 28 (file separator). However using BufferedReader.read() I get -1 forever. Is it reading only the last character to have been sent to the socket?
As a side note, if I use readLine() (making sure the socket is sent a newline at end of msg) I can get the message fine. However, I want to be able to receive a message with 0 or many newlines in it (basically contents of a text file), so I want to avoid the readLine() method.
Any help at all is appreciated,
Colm
CODE SNIPPET:
try
serverSocket = new ServerSocket(listenToPort);
System.out.println("Server waiting for client on port " + serverSocket.getLocalPort());
while(true)
inSocket = serverSocket.accept();
System.out.println("New connection accepted " + inSocket.getInetAddress() + ":" + inSocket.getPort());
input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inSocket.getInputStream()));
fileOutput = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(outputFilename));
System.out.println("Ready to write to file: " + outputFilename);
//receive each character and output it to file until file separator arrives
while(!eof)
inCharBuf = input.read();
System.out.print(inCharBuf);
//check for file separator (ASCII code 28)
if (inCharBuf == 28) eof = true;
//inChar = (char) inCharBuf;
fileOutput.write(inCharBuf);
System.out.println("Finished writing to file: " + outputFilename);
inSocket.close();
catch (IOException e)
System.out.println("IO Error with serverSocket: " + e);
System.exit(-1);
}(tabbing removed as it was messing up formatting)

Answer 1

My guess is that the code that is writing to the
socket did not flush it. You said in one case you
could read it (via readln) if the writer was writing
lines (writeln flushes, I believe). Are you writing
the exact same data to the socket in both tests?woo hoo, I hadn't flushed the buffers alright!
for anyone with similar problems, I was missing this from my write-to-socket method:
output.flush();
where output was the BufferedWriter I had created to write to the socket.
Thanks a lot for pointing it out!
Colm