Multi-line reading from applet?

Question

I just began using a technique to get a single value
from the web server to my applet via CGI-BIN.
Please see relevant code below.
With this technique -I was given a chunk of code, I don't
even understand its behavior completely- I can retrieve
one value from the server. Now I would like to retrieve
multi-line data, such as that coming from a SQL statement which
will be used to populate my applet's menus.
So, how should I retrieve this cursor-like, or stream data?
I suppose I need to put the "s = d.readLine()" statement inside
a loop, but what loop variable shoould I use??
TIA,
-Ramon F. Herrera
URL url;
URLConnection urlConn = null;
DataOutputStream dos;
DataInputStream dis;
InputStream is;
url = prepareServerCommand(Id, true);
try {
urlConn = url.openConnection();
} catch (IOException ex) {
urlConn.setDoInput(true);
urlConn.setDoOutput(true);
urlConn.setUseCaches(false);
urlConn.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
String s = null;
try {
dos = new DataOutputStream(urlConn.getOutputStream());
String message = "NEW_ITEM=1";
dos.writeBytes(message);
dos.flush();
dos.close();
is = url.openStream();
BufferedReader d = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is));
s = d.readLine(); // <-- THIS NEEDS TO BE INSIDE A LOOP!!
d.close();
} catch (IOException ex1) {
jButton1.setText("Number of Items:");
jTextField1.setText(s);
done = 1;
return (done);

Answer 1

Here's a way:
String $URL = "http://server.com/cgi-bin/a.cgi?whatever=1";
try{
URL url = new URL($URL);
BufferedReader in =
new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()));
String $nextline, $returned = "";
while(($nextline = in.readLine()) != null){
$returned += $nextline + '\n';
if($returned.indexOf("END OF DATA") > -1) break;
in.close();
}catch(Exception e){System.out.println("ERROR: " + e);}
System.out.println($returned);
Note the line containing "END OF DATA". The reason I did that was that the connection was just getting stuck in that loop for too long. By using something to mark the end of the data, I was able to break out of the loop sooner. Maybe there's a better way but I don't know it.