I got simple server-client app.
The idia is:
Client send to server string with sql-request.
Server process the request and send back on client answer with data formated in csv style string.
Everything is already adjusted accept one thing. The problem is to read answer on client cause I don't know the size of recieved string.
Code is bellow:
Server:
std::string answer;
answer = sql_read(*msg); //get the string with data from request
clientSock->write_some(buffer(answer, answer.size())); //send it back on client
Client:
std::string answer;
bytesRead = sock->read_some(boost::asio::buffer(readBuf, inputSize)); //read the answer, but how do I know correct size of string?
string_ptr msg(new std::string(readBuf, bytesRead));
answer = *msg;
How to read the resulting string without knowing its size?
Or if my aproach (with sending data in string) is radically wrong how to do it in correct way?
You must handle this yourself in the protocol the client and server use to speak to each other.
One way is to use a deliminator and use boost::asio::read_until(). Example:
boost::asio::streambuf buf;
boost::asio::read_until (sock, buf, "\r\n"); // or '\0' if zero terminated
Check the Boost.Asio documentation.
Another way is to send the size in an fixed length header before sending the variable length part.
You won't know the size of the string in advance. Where you do the read_some you will need to do a loop to read all the data from the socket. You need to check the number of bytes read and the size of the buffer you allocated. If they are equal then you filled up your read buffer and you need to do another read to check for any remaining data.
Related
I am writing a server-client application using Winsock in c++ for sending a file line by line and I have a problem in sending huge string. The line size is very huge.
For getting the message from the client by the server I use the code below.
int result;
char message[200];
while (true)
{
recv(newSd, (char*)&message, sizeof(message), 0);
cout << "The Message from client: " << message << ";";
}
The above code working fine if I send small length of the message. But, what I wanted is to send an unknown size of lines in a file.
How to send a big unknown string instead of char message[200];
TCP is a byte stream, it knows nothing about messages or lines or anything like that. When you send data over TCP, all it knows about is raw bytes, not what the bytes represent. It is your responsibility to implement a messaging protocol on top of TCP to delimit the data in some meaningful way so the receiver can know when the data is complete. There are two ways to do that:
send the data length before sending the actual data. The receiver reads the length first, then reads however many bytes the length says.
send a unique terminator after sending the data. Make sure the terminator never appears in the data. The receiver can then read until the terminator is received.
You are not handling either of those in your recv() code, so I suspect you are not handling either of them in your send() code, too (which you did not show).
Since you are sending a text file, you can either:
send the file size, such as in a uint32_t or uint64_t (depending on how large the file is), then send the raw file bytes.
send each text line individually as-is, terminated by a CRLF or bare-LF line break after each line, and then send a final terminator after the last line.
You are also ignoring the return value of recv(), which tells you how many bytes were actually received. It can, and usually does, return fewer bytes than requested, so you must be prepared to call recv() multiple times, usually in a loop, to receive data completely. Same with send().
i am trying to send data via tcp socket to a server. The idea behind that is a really simple chat programm.
The string I am trying to send looks like the following:
1:2:e9e633097ab9ceb3e48ec3f70ee2beba41d05d5420efee5da85f97d97005727587fda33ef4ff2322088f4c79e8133cc9cd9f3512f4d3a303cbdb5bc585415a00:2:xc_[z kxc_[z kxc_[z kxc_[==
As you can see there a few unprintable characters which I don't think are a problem here.
To send this data I am using the following code snippet.
bool tcp_client::send_data(string data)
{
if( send(sock , data.c_str(), strlen(data.c_str()) , 0) < 0)
{
perror("Send failed : ");
return false;
}
return true;
}
After a few minutes of trying things out I came up, that data.c_str() cuts my string of.
The result is:
1:2:e9e633097ab9ceb3e48ec3f70ee2beba41d05d5420efee5da85f97d97005727587fda33ef4ff2322088f4c79e8133cc9cd9f3512f4d3a303cbdb5bc585415a00:2:xc_[z
I think that there is some kind of null sequence inside my string which is a problem for the c_str() function.
Is there a way to send the whole string as I mentioned aboved without cutting it off?
Thanks.
Is there a way to send the whole string as I mentioned aboved without cutting it off?
What about:
send(sock , data.c_str(), data.size() , 0);
There are only two sane ways to send arbitrary data (such as a array of characters) over stream sockets:
On the server: close the socket after data was sent (like in ftp, http 0.9, etc). On the client - read until socket is closed in a loop.
On the server: prefix the data with fixed-length size (nowadays people usualy use 64 bit integers for size, watch out for endiannes). On the client - read the size first (in a loop!), than read the data until size bytes are read (in a loop).
Everything else is going to backfire sooner or later.
I have to send information between a client and a server in C++. I have found that the following code allows me to send integers over the connection.
Server:
int number = 5;
send(clientSocket, (char*)&number, sizeof(number), 0); //Integer is sent to client
Client:
int number;
recv(serverSocket, (char*)&number, sizeof(number), 0); //Integer is received and assigned to 'number'
However, I am now trying to send a wstring variable using the exact same code (replace 'int' with 'wstring') and it fails to send the value correctly. How can I send a wstring over the socket and receive it on the client?
Step 1:
Sender and receiver agree on a shared character encoding. If you are writing both sender and receiver, this is easy. Pick one. Preferably pick one with a good C++ support library on both the sending and receiving platforms. UTF-8 generally has good support.
Step 2:
Sender and receiver agree on how you will signal the end of a string. Common choices are read until NULL and sending the length of the string before you send the string. Some times you want to send the length of the encoded string in bytes to make reading and buffering the encoded string easier.
Step 3:
Sender encodes the string using the agreed upon encoding into a char buffer. This is, unfortunately, messier in C++ than it should be. You may find yourself going back to step 1 and re-choosing the encoding because the encoding you chose doesn't have as good library support as you thought.
Step 4 A:
Write the buffer from step 3 and the length-determining method was selected in step 2 into the socket.
Step 4B:
Read the buffer from the socket, stopping when the terminating condition chosen in step 2 is met. If looking for an end of string marker or a count of strings, you will have to read and buffer, then convert byte by byte, reading and buffering more as required. If you sent the size of the encoded string, you can read and buffer the whole string in one shot and then let the decoder loose.
To send a C++ class (which std::wstring is an example of) you have to serialize it: convert it to the format which can be sent and received. A binary object representation (which you get by taking an address of an object) is not suitable for that purpose.
Luckily, serializing std::wstring is not much of a trouble. You just need to access it's character buffer using it's c_str() method. The only one thing you need to remeber is that you also need to tell the receiver how long the string is - so that receiver know how much to read.
I have a server thats sending out data records as strings of varying length(for eg, 79,80,81,82)
I want to be able to receive exactly one record at a time.I've delimited records with a (r) but because I dont know howmany bytes I have to receive, It sometimes merges records and makes it difficult for me to process.
I have two ideas for you:
Use XML for the protocol. This way you know exactly when each message ends.
Send in the header of each "packet" the packet size, this way you know how much to read from the socket for this specific packet.
Edit:
Look at this dummy code for (2)
int buffer_size;
char* buffer;
read( socket, &buffer_size, sizeof(buffer_size));
buffer = (char*) malloc(packet_size);
read( socket, buffer, buffer_size );
// do something
free( buffer) ;
EDIT:
I recommend looking at the comments here, as they note that the contect might not be ready by a simple "read()", you need to keep "read()"ing, until you get the correct buffer size.
Also - you might not need to read the size. Basically you need to look for the ending top level tag of the XML. This can be done by parsing the whole XML, or parlty parsing the XML you get from the stream untill you have 0 nodes "open".
You should delimit with null byte. Show us your code, and we may be able to help you.
Stream sockets do not natively support an idea of a "record" - the abstraction they provide is that of a continuous stream.
You must implement a layer on top of them to provide "records". It sounds like you are already part way there, with the end-of-record delimiter. The pseudo-code to complete it is:
create empty buffer;
forever {
recv data and append to buffer;
while (buffer contains end-of-record marker) {
remove first record from buffer and process it;
move remaining data to beginning of buffer;
}
}
Are you sending your data as a stream?
You can send it as a structure which is easier to parse and retrieve the data from.
struct Message
{
int dataSize;
char data[256];
};
I have a TCP client connecting to my server which is sending raw data packets. How, using Boost.Asio, can I get the "whole" packet every time (asynchronously, of course)? Assume these packets can be any size up to the full size of my memory.
Basically, I want to avoid creating a statically sized buffer.
Typically when you build a custom protocol on the top of TCP/IP you use a simple message format where first 4 bytes is an unsigned integer containing the message length and the rest is the message data. If you have such a protocol then the reception loop is as simple as below (not sure what is ASIO notation, so it's just an idea)
for(;;) {
uint_32_t len = 0u;
read(socket, &len, 4); // may need multiple reads in non-blocking mode
len = ntohl(len);
assert (len < my_max_len);
char* buf = new char[len];
read(socket, buf, len); // may need multiple reads in non-blocking mode
...
}
typically, when you do async IO, your protocol should support it.
one easy way is to prefix a byte array with it's length at the logical level, and have the reading code buffer up until it has a full buffer ready for parsing.
if you don't do it, you will end up with this logic scattered all over the place (think about reading a null terminated string, and what it means if you just get a part of it every time select/poll returns).
TCP doesn't operate with packets. It provides you one contiguous stream. You can ask for the next N bytes, or for all the data received so far, but there is no "packet" boundary, no way to distinguish what is or is not a packet.