How to get the Socket Buffer size in C#

Question

I have a Socket code which is communicating through TCP/IP.The machine to which i am communicating has buffer data in its buffer.At present i am trying to get the buffer data using this code.

byte data = new byte[1024];
int recv = sock.Receive(data);   
stringData = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(data, 0, recv);

But this code retrieves only 11 lines of data whereas more data is there in the machines buffer.Is this because i have used int recv = sock.Receive(data); and data is 1024 ? If yes ,How to get the total buffer size and retrieve it into string.

Answer 1

If you think you are missing some data, then you need to check recv and almost certainly: loop. Fortunately, ASCII is always single byte - in most other encodings you would also have to worry about receiving partial characters.

A common approach is basically:

int recv;
while((recv = sock.Receive(data)) > 0)
{
    // process recv-many bytes
    // ... stringData = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(data, 0, recv);
}

Keep in mind that there is no guarantee that stringData will be any particular entire unit of work; what you send is not always what you receive, and that could be a single character, 14 lines, or the second half of one word and the first half of another. You generally need to maintain your own back-buffer of received data until you have a complete logical frame to process.

Note, however, Receive always tries to return something (at least one byte), unless the inbound stream has closed - and will block to do so. If this is a problem, you may need to check the available buffer (sock.Available) to decide whether to do synchronous versus asynchronous receive (i.e. read synchronously while data is available, otherwise request an asynchronous read).