Internet Packet based Chat

Question

Hi there,
Im creating an internet based chat program, with a client, and a server program. It works by sending and recieving packets. I can get both my applications sending packets which are in a char array of maximum size 285. I know I have them sending because I have used hyperterminal and seen the output I want. However, they dont seem to be displaying on the other program. The code I have is this to send:
        public void sendPacket (char[] packet) {
            list.add("sendPacket function recieved: " + new String (packet));
            //send the packet passed to it
            try {
                for(int i = 0; i < PACKETLENGTH; i++)
                    System.out.print(packet);
bw.write(packet[i]);
} catch (IOException e) {
list.add("Error Sending packet.");
The code I have to recieve it which doesnt seem to work is this:
        public void run()
                while (true)
                        try                         //HANDLE RECIEVED MESSAGES
                            list.add(br.readLine());
                        }catch (Exception e){}
     }Could it be because the packets are larger than one line? Im fairly new to programming, and hope someone can help me out with this, because all has been going well with this project until now.. :-(
the list is the window which displays all the messages, and bw and br are bufferedreader and bufferedwriter,,
-Tom

Answer 1

just a follow up question.
but when you send it through a socket maybe, don't
they like get transported as a raw data (not java
specific types). Yes. What led you to believe that a char was "raw" data?
Or alternatively, what led you to believe that you could read raw data as if it were a String?
This doesn't work:
String hello = new char[];And that's essentialy what you tried to do.
My point is im confused on whether the types would
really matter. Yes. If you write bytes, you must read bytes. If you write chars you must read chars. If you write String objects, you must read String objects.
Take a look at ObjectInputStream and ObjectOutputStream.
Dave.