Measure Size of Data Sent over Socket

Question

I was thinking about how you would read how much data you send over a Socket. For example if I made a Chat Application and then wanted to find out how much a message would take (in kilobytes or bytes), how would I measure this?

I send a message like "Hello, world!". How do I measure the amount of bandwidth that would take to send?

I know there are programs to monitor how much data is sent and received over the wire and all that, but I wanted to try and do this myself to learn some.

Answer 1

Wrap the socket's output stream in a CountingOutputStream :

CountingOutputStream cos = new CountingOutputStream(socket.getOutputStream());
cos.write(...);
System.out.println("wrote " + cos.getByteCount() + " bytes");

Answer 2

If you send raw string with no header (protocol) For the strings you have

String hello = "Hello World";
hello.getBytes().length //size of the message

For showing progress to user when sending files you can do this

Socket s = new Socket();
//connect to the client, etc...

//supose you have 5 MB File
FileInputStream f = new FileInputStream( myLocalFile );

//declare a variable
int bytesSent = 0;
int c;
while( (c = f.read()) != -1) {
   s.getOutputStream().write(c);
   bytesSent++; //One more byte sent!
   notifyGuiTotalBytesSent(bytesSent);
}

well, thats just a very simple implementation not using a buffer to read and send the data just for you get the idea. the method nitify.... would show in the GUI thread (not this one) the bytesSent value