Python Socket Receive Large Amount of Data

Question

When I try to receive larger amounts of data it gets cut off and I have to press enter to get the rest of the data. At first I was able to increase it a little bit but it still won't receive all of it. As you can see I have increased the buffer on the conn.recv() but it still doesn't get all of the data. It cuts it off at a certain point. I have to press enter on my raw_input in order to receive the rest of the data. Is there anyway I can get all of the data at once? Here's the code.

port = 7777
sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
sock.bind(('0.0.0.0', port))
sock.listen(1)
print ("Listening on port: "+str(port))
while 1:
    conn, sock_addr = sock.accept()
    print "accepted connection from", sock_addr
    while 1:
        command = raw_input('shell> ')
            conn.send(command)
                data = conn.recv(8000)
                if not data: break
                print data,
    conn.close()

Answer 1

The accepted answer is fine but it will be really slow with big files -string is an immutable class this means more objects are created every time you use the + sign, using list as a stack structure will be more efficient.

This should work better

while True: 
    chunk = s.recv(10000)
    if not chunk: 
        break
    fragments.append(chunk)

print "".join(fragments)

Answer 2

You can use it as: data = recvall(sock)

def recvall(sock):
    BUFF_SIZE = 4096 # 4 KiB
    data = b''
    while True:
        part = sock.recv(BUFF_SIZE)
        data += part
        if len(part) < BUFF_SIZE:
            # either 0 or end of data
            break
    return data

Answer 3

Modifying Adam Rosenfield's code:

import sys


def send_msg(sock, msg):
    size_of_package = sys.getsizeof(msg)
    package = str(size_of_package)+":"+ msg #Create our package size,":",message
    sock.sendall(package)

def recv_msg(sock):
    try:
        header = sock.recv(2)#Magic, small number to begin with.
        while ":" not in header:
            header += sock.recv(2) #Keep looping, picking up two bytes each time

        size_of_package, separator, message_fragment = header.partition(":")
        message = sock.recv(int(size_of_package))
        full_message = message_fragment + message
        return full_message

    except OverflowError:
        return "OverflowError."
    except:
        print "Unexpected error:", sys.exc_info()[0]
        raise

I would, however, heavily encourage using the original approach.

Answer 4

A variation using a generator function (which I consider more pythonic):

def recvall(sock, buffer_size=4096):
    buf = sock.recv(buffer_size)
    while buf:
        yield buf
        if len(buf) < buffer_size: break
        buf = sock.recv(buffer_size)
# ...
with socket.create_connection((host, port)) as sock:
    sock.sendall(command)
    response = b''.join(recvall(sock))

Answer 5

You can do it using Serialization

from socket import *
from json import dumps, loads

def recvall(conn):
    data = ""
    while True:
    try:
        data = conn.recv(1024)
        return json.loads(data)
    except ValueError:
        continue

def sendall(conn):
    conn.sendall(json.dumps(data))

NOTE: If you want to shara a file using code above you need to encode / decode it into base64

Answer 6

TCP/IP is a stream-based protocol, not a message-based protocol. There's no guarantee that every send() call by one peer results in a single recv() call by the other peer receiving the exact data sent—it might receive the data piece-meal, split across multiple recv() calls, due to packet fragmentation.

You need to define your own message-based protocol on top of TCP in order to differentiate message boundaries. Then, to read a message, you continue to call recv() until you've read an entire message or an error occurs.

One simple way of sending a message is to prefix each message with its length. Then to read a message, you first read the length, then you read that many bytes. Here's how you might do that:

def send_msg(sock, msg):
    # Prefix each message with a 4-byte length (network byte order)
    msg = struct.pack('>I', len(msg)) + msg
    sock.sendall(msg)

def recv_msg(sock):
    # Read message length and unpack it into an integer
    raw_msglen = recvall(sock, 4)
    if not raw_msglen:
        return None
    msglen = struct.unpack('>I', raw_msglen)[0]
    # Read the message data
    return recvall(sock, msglen)

def recvall(sock, n):
    # Helper function to recv n bytes or return None if EOF is hit
    data = b''
    while len(data) < n:
        packet = sock.recv(n - len(data))
        if not packet:
            return None
        data += packet
    return data

Then you can use the send_msg and recv_msg functions to send and receive whole messages, and they won't have any problems with packets being split or coalesced on the network level.