C# streaming sockets, how to separate messages?

Question

Kinda long title, but anyways...

I\'ve been looking at these examples, specifically on the parts on writing and reading the size of the message to the byte streams

Answer 1

You could also, if you wanted to preserve the plaintextness of it, specify a specific maximum size and pad the number via string.Format. (Say for instance only allowing 4 characters in the length) This avoids the problems of numbers in the useful datastream, and simplifies decoding as well.

A final plaintext solution is to put a specific character between length and data, such as -, then grab single characters at a time till you hit a minus, decode the retrieved string (Ignoring the minus of course) and then use that to determine the length of the remaining string, and your output code which simply need to be changed to add that character in between.