c# - Problem reading from a TCPClient

Question

I'm making a simple client application in C#, and have reached a problem.

The server application sends a string in the format of "<number> <param> <param>" etc. In other words, the first symbol is an integer, and the rest are whatever, all are separated by one space each.

The problem I get, when reading this string, is that my program first reads a string with the , and then the next time I read I get the rest of the message. For example, if I were to do a writeline on what I receive, it would look like this: (if he sends "1 0 0 0")

1
 0 0 0 

(EDIT: The formatting doesn't seem to permit this. The 1 is on a row of its own, the rest are supposed to be on the row below, including the space preceding the first 0)

I've run out of ideas how to fix this. Here's the method (I commented out some stuff I tried): http://pastebin.com/0bXC9J2f

EDIT (again): I forgot, it seems to work just fine when I'm in debug and just go through everything step by step, so I can't find any source of the problem that way.

Answer 1

TCP is stream based and not message based. One Read can contain any of the following alternatives:

• A teeny weeny part of message
• A half message
• Excactly one message
• One and a half message
• Two messages

Thus you need to use some kind of method to see if a complete message have arrived. The most common methods are:

• Add a footer (for instance an empty line) which indicates end of message
• Add a fixed length header containing the length of the message