Thread: While loop stops.

I'm making an instant messenger in java and using a thread to check if there are any received messages. But for some reason it only loops through the while loop in my run method once. I put a print line at the beginning of the loop and it a print line before the only statement where it can terminate itself and I don't see either one of those print statements (except I see the fist one, once). I also go no error messages and my application isn't frozen. Why does it only loop once?

By the way. I know it's messenger, not messanger. But it's only a test application so I'm not going to sniff out all my variables over one misspelling.

	BufferedReader in;
	String incomingMessage;
	Thread t;
 
	public MessageReciever(BufferedReader i)
	{
		in = i;
		t = new Thread(this);
		t.start();
	}
 
        public void run()
	{
		try
		{
			while(true)
			{
				System.out.println("1");
				try
				{
					if((incomingMessage = in.readLine()) != null)
						MessangerDisplay.append(incomingMessage);
				}
				catch(IOException e)
				{
					System.out.println("x");
					MessangerDisplay.append("The user has dropped.");
					stop();
				}
 
				t.sleep(50);
			}
		}
		catch(InterruptedException e2)
		{
			MessangerDisplay.append("Thread interrupted.");
		}
	}

Add some println statements so we can figure out where exactly something is occurring.

Put a statement directly before and after the thread sleep. Also put some statements inside the try statement. 1 before the if statement. 1 before the call in the if statement. 1 after the call in the if statement. 1 after the if statement. Also, put a statement in the catch statement where you catch the InterruptedException. Lastly, put a statement before and after the while loop.

Basically, since we are having an issue, we want to figure out exactly where that issue is. Perhaps the loop is only running once because it reaches a point where it gets stuck. If so, we want to find out where that is. When you are having a issue that you cannot track down, you need to figure out the general area of where it is happening. Print statements can be your best friend here. However, you should remember to remove them when they are not relevant to the issue at hand and you have to be careful about overloading, as they will slow down your program and will sometimes cause a crash. When you are initially debugging a situation like this, it doesnt hurt to overload in print statements. Doing so will narrow down the locations for us to look. When we rule out a specific area (especially in loops), it doesn't hurt to at least comment out those print statements for the time being.

When I debug with print statements, I always make each printout unique so I can track them back. I usually do things like: System.out.println("Check 1"); System.out.println("Check 2");...ect. Doing that can allow me to easily find the location while just reading the printouts and not even looking at the code. I can then go back and look at the code to find where that check occurred. Things to worry about are checks running repeating by itself alot and not reaching the final check, where ever you expect that to be.

Tell us what you get for your output and we can work from there.

Originally Posted by MrFish

Ok, I've done that and found that this is the line that pauses it.

incomingMessage = in.readLine()

If I comment it out the loop runs. I've printed in.toString() and it is my BufferedReader object.

Oh, wow, I can't believe I didn't realize. So obvious.

The BufferedReader reading methods wait for the user to press Enter (I think) till it reads the line. Basically, it is designed to wait until an input occurs.