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 = bytearray()
while len(data) < n:
packet = sock.recv(n - len(data))
if not packet:
return None
data.extend(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.