How do you handle Socket Disconnecting in Java? [duplicate]

Question

Hey all. I have a server written in java using the ServerSocket and Socket classes.

I want to be able to detect and handle disconnects, and then reconnect a new client if necessary.

What is the proper procedure to detect client disconnections, close the socket, and then accept new clients?

Answer 1

Presumably, you're reading from the socket, perhaps using a wrapper over the input stream, such as a BufferedReader. In this case, you can detect the end-of-stream when the corresponding read operation returns -1 (for raw read() calls), or null (for readLine() calls).

Certain operations will cause a SocketException when performed on a closed socket, which you will also need to deal with appropriately.