socket question

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006 08:13:43 -0500, hg <hg at nospam.com> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I am not sure whether this is a python-related question.
>
>If I have device A than sends XX bytes to device B, and device B does a
>recv(XX) using the default timeout, what could make device B wake-up
>with less than XX bytes received ?

Assuming the sends take place over a TCP connection, any number of things.
In generally, you cannot rely on anything about the length of the string
returned from recv(N) except that:

  it will not be greater than N
  it will not be less than 1 unless the connection has been lost

If you expect a particular number of bytes, you need to call recv()
multiple times and collect the returned strings until you have as many
bytes as you wanted.

Jean-Paul