[ACCEPTED]-What 0 returned by InputStream.read() means? How to handle this?-inputstream

Accepted answer

Score: 18

The only situation in which a InputStream may return 10 0 from a call to read(byte[]) is when the byte[] passed in 9 has a length of 0:

 byte[] buf = new byte[0];
 int read = in.read(buf); // read will contain 0

As specified by this part 8 of the JavaDoc:

If the length of b is zero, then 7 no bytes are read and 0 is returned

My guess: you 6 used available() to see how big the buffer should be 5 and it returned 0. Note that this is a misuse 4 of available(). The JavaDoc explicitly states that:

It 3 is never correct to use the return value 2 of this method to allocate a buffer intended 1 to hold all data in this stream.

Score: 10

Take a look at the implementation of javax.sound.AudioInputStream#read(byte[] b, int 10 off, int len) ... yuck. They completely 9 violated the standard java.io.InputStream 8 semantics and return a read size of 0 if 7 you request fewer than a whole frame of 6 data.

So unfortunately; the common advice 5 (and api spec) should preclude having to 4 deal with return of zero when len > 0 but 3 even for JDK provided classes you can't 2 universally rely on this to be true for 1 InputStreams of arbitrary types.

Again, yuck.

Score: 3

According to Java API Doc:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/io/InputStream.html#read(byte[])

It only can happen 6 if the byte[] you passed has zero items 5 (new byte[0]).

In other situations it must 4 return at least one byte. Or -1 if EOF reached. Or 3 an exception.

Of course: it depends of the actual implementation 2 of the InputStream you are using!!! (it 1 could be a wrong one)

Score: 0

I observed the same behavior (reading 0 3 bytes) when I build a swing console output 2 window and made a reader-thread for stdout 1 and stderr via the following code:

                this.pi = new PipedInputStream();
                po = new PipedOutputStream((PipedInputStream)pi);
                System.setOut(new PrintStream(po, true));

When the 'main' swing application exits, and my console window is still open I read 0 from this.pi.read(). The read data was put on the console window resulting in a race condition some how, just ignoring the result and not updating the console window solved the issue.

Source: stackoverflow.com

[ACCEPTED]-What 0 returned by InputStream.read() means? How to handle this?-inputstream

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