Simple Question I expect

[mattaseymour]

I am wanting to read data via bluetooth to the lego mindstorm NXT brick. The current problem I have is that the DataInputStream.read(byte[]) returns an int.

How do I read an ASCII string through bluetooth as a byte array?

[lawrie]

That method reads data into the byte array and returns the number of bytes read. You can send asciii data as bytes by casting each byte to a char.

For example:

Code: Select all

void sendAscii(String s, DataOutputStream dos) throws IOException {
  byte[] b = new byte[s.length()];

  for(int i =0;i<s.length();i++) {
    b[i] = (byte) s.charAt(i);
  }

  dos.writeInt(s.length];
  dos.write(b);
  dos.flush();
}

String readAscii(DataInputStream dis)  throws IOException {
  int sl = dis.readInt();

  byte[] b = new byte[sl];
  StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();

  int l = dis.read(b);

  for(int i=0;i<l;i++) {
    sb.append((char) b[i]);
  }

  return sb.toString();
}


You can read and write characters instead of bytes on the data streams if you prefer. The readLine() method of DataInputStream does this.