Determine size of string in bytes

[breal]

On Mar 27, 2:10 pm, John Machin <sjmac... at lexicon.net> wrote:
> On Mar 28, 6:45 am, breal <hacker.steven... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Forgive me for this question which is most likely stupid...
>
> The contents of your question are not stupid. The subject however does
> invite a stupid answer like: len(the_string).
>
> Disclaimer: I know nothing about SOAP except that it's usually
> capitalised :-) Now read on:
>
> > How do I determine the number of bytes a string takes up?  I have a
> > soap server that is returning a serialized string.
>
> Serialised how? UTF-8?
>

Yes.  I meant to include that.  I did not understand that len()
returned the actual byte length of a UTF-8 encoded string.

> >  It seems that when
> > the string goes over 65978 characters it does not return to the soap
> > client.
>
> Why does it seem so? How did you arrive at such a precise limit?
>

I actually just wrote a test that would call a function on the SOAP
server (SOAPpy) that would increase or decrease the test length based
on the previous result until it found x, x+1 where x characters didn't
fail, but x+1 did.  x ended up being 65978.  The string I happen to be
encoding in this case has all ascii characters so it is the same for
both encodings.


> >  Instead I get an error:
> > error: (35, 'Resource temporarily unavailable')
>
> Is this error from the client or the server? Any error or logfile
> record from the other side?
>

This is an error on the server.  The client is actually written in
PHP.

There is no log file, but there is a traceback...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/
python2.5/SocketServer.py", line 464, in process_request_thread
    self.finish_request(request, client_address)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/
python2.5/SocketServer.py", line 254, in finish_request
    self.RequestHandlerClass(request, client_address, self)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/
python2.5/SocketServer.py", line 522, in __init__
    self.handle()
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/
python2.5/BaseHTTPServer.py", line 316, in handle
    self.handle_one_request()
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/
python2.5/BaseHTTPServer.py", line 310, in handle_one_request
    method()
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/
python2.5/site-packages/SOAPpy/Server.py", line 545, in do_POST
    self.wfile.write(resp)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/
python2.5/socket.py", line 262, in write
    self.flush()
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/
python2.5/socket.py", line 249, in flush
    self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (35, 'Resource temporarily unavailable')
----------------------------------------



> Is there anything in the documentation about maximum sizes?
>
>

I googled my brains out looking for anything about maximum size both
on the Python SOAP server, and the PHP SOAP client.

>
> > This makes me think the problem exists on the soap client side with
> > some sort of max return length.
>
> Think? Can't you verify this by inspecting the source?
>

I haven't inspected the source, but I have inspected the
documentation.  No luck in finding anything about it.  I suppose I
could download the client source and see what I can see.

> > If I knew how many bytes the 65978
> > character string was, then I could try to up this value.
>
> How do you know the string is 65978 characters? If you are debugging
> the server, can't you do len(serialise(the_65978_char_string))?
>
> 65978? Are you sure? Looks suspiciously close to 65535 aka 0xFFFF aka
> (2 ** 16 - 1 ) to me.
>
> If you have the server, you presumably have the source code for both
> client and server. Some options for you:
>
> (1) Look at the traceback(s), look at the source code, nut it out for
> yourself. If there is some kind of max other than an implicit 16-bit
> limitation in the client code, it shouldn't be too hard to find.
>
> (2) Post the traceback(s) here, along with other details that might be
> useful, like what SOAP server s/w you are using, what version of
> Python, what platform.
>

See traceback above.
SOAPpy
Python 2.5
OSX Server


Thanks for the response John.