What is the recommended way to iterate over lines sent via a network socket?

[Finnian Reilly]

I am wondering what the recommended way is to iterate over lines from a socket until the client closes the connection. This seems to work in practice but I am wondering if I am supposed to test with ffmpeg_socket.is_readable. Unlike FILE there is no `end_of_file' test in STREAM_SOCKET.



from until client_socket.was_error loop
    client_socket.read_line
    if not client_socket.was_error then
        line := client_socket.last_string
        -- bla bla
    end
end

[Finnian Reilly]

My question of course relates to EiffelNet

[Finnian Reilly]

I have been trying to answer my own question with some experiments:

from until not client_socket.is_readable loop
    client_socket.read_line
    ..
end

However this did not work at all in the example I tried. But on examining the source for routine {SOCKET}.read_line, it does seem that calling `was_error' is the only way to detect the end of the transmission.

    read_line, readline
            -- Read a line of characters (ended by a new_line).
        local
            l_last_string: like last_string
        do
            create l_last_string.make (512)
            read_character
            from
            until
                last_character = '%N' or else was_error
            loop
                l_last_string.extend (last_character)
                read_character
            end
            last_string := l_last_string
        end

Nothing wrong with this I guess, although it does seem a bit odd that doing something this natural is treated as an error condition.