Reader not behaving as expected...

Question

I'm trying to read from a java.io.Reader and I am not getting the -1 at the end of the input as expected. My code is below.
The while(true) loop, which is the outerloop, should be broken out of as soon as the -1 is read. The problem is that the -1 is never read and the loop ends up looping infinitely.
Any ideas?
Reader reader = parser.getReader();
String text = "";
outerloop:while (true)
    if ( ! reader.ready()) Thread.sleep(50);
    innerloop:while (rdr.ready())
        int c = rdr.read();
        if (c==-1)  break outerloop;
        text += (char)c;
}

Answer 1

1) if the reader wasn't ready what assures that it
will be ready after 50 ms?Nothing does. However, if it is not ready, then the following loop will simply not execute and the main loop will start over and it will wait another 50 ms. The alternative of putting the Thread.sleep(50) line in a loop as follows...
while ( ! reader.ready()) Thread.sleep(50);...has gotten me in trouble in the past when the reader is finished and so is never ready, so I just end up sleeping over and over again. Of course my current implementation is also giving me an infinite loop since I'm never reading the -1, so I guess I haven't gained much.
2) to what is that reader connected? If the reader is connect to, say, the
standard input (keyboard), it won't return -1 unless you type ctrl-D (unix
flavour) or ctrl-Z (ms flavour). If the reader is connected to a socket, the
other side has to close the socket in order for your reader to detect an
EOF condition.The reader provided by an objecet in the Apache Jakarta Lucene package. It is an HTML Parser that takes an HTML document and is supposed to write out just the text after stripping all the tags. I am supposed to be able to read this text using the Reader.
It has occured to me that perhaps the object is not writing -1 when it is finished or is not closing the stream. In this case it would appear that whoever programmed that class did not do what he was supposed to. I'm skeptical of this line of reasoning, however, because the Apache Jakarta stuff is pretty reputable and I don't think this is just a mistake on their end.
The object that I get the reader from launches a new thread when I call the getReader() method. Somehow this thread has to signal that it is done with the processing and I have received all the input I am ever going to get. I just don't know what this signal is. The "-1" signal that the API tells me I should get never arrives.
Thanks for your help. Any more help would be appreciated.