[Carlos]

I couldn't find this in the docs. How can this be done without having to rely in exception throwing?

[kris]

The reader/writer facade is designed for IO where the content-layout is defined; for example, one might serialize a class, and then deserialize it. When the reader runs into a condition where 'expected' data is simply not available, an exceptional condition is raised.

In other words, the reader/writer pair are actually a mechanism for data formatting/parsing. To operate with a more loosly defined input protocol (where content may or may not be present), it's often more appropriate to use an Iterator instead. Alternately, one might peek at the remaining buffer content, to see if there's anything available before using the reader?

If you need something that sits in the middle between these two, let's talk

[Carlos]

The thing is I need to extract information from DBF files so I used Mango. According to some specs I read, the EOF is marked by the byte 0x1A, but in the files I was reading, that byte wasn't present so I kept getting an exception (EOF). So, I think sometimes that byte will be there but sometimes it won't, so I want to know if there's just one more byte before reading. Any ideas?

[kris]

You can check the buffer to see if readable() > 0. If so, then you're still good, otherwise invoke buffer.fill() and check for Eof return. We should probably add a method that wraps this kind of thing, but there's some trickiness involved for other types of conduits such as Sockets (needs a timeout?).

Another approach is to use a MappedBuffer instead. That will memory-map your file as a virtual byte-array. That will make the Eof test simpler, since there's never any buffer.fill() needed.

A similar method is to simply read the entire file into a buffer to start with; the stock buffer is then equivalent to a MappedBuffer in many ways:

[Carlos]

[kris]

If you have a Reader, you can call getBuffer() on it

I'm sometimes a bit wary of loading entire files also, which is partly why the MappedBuffer option is available.

[Carlos]