Features

This library provides a single class TcpClient that manages connecting, disconnecting, and automatically reconnecting to another machine TCP. Received data is exposed as a Stream that remains consistent even if the underlying socket disconnects and reconnects.

Additionally, the connection status of the socket is also exposed as a Stream.

This class makes it easy to send and receive data as bytes or strings, and it optionally can wrap the send functions in a Future that will resolve with the server's response.

Additionally, this class allows you to specify a terminator as either bytes or strings to identify when a full 'message' has been received or not. For example, standard Telnet clients use \r\n as the string that separates messages from each other, and HTTP uses \r\n\r\n to separate different parts of a message. Each TCP protocol should define its own terminator.

This class makes no assumption about the encoding of transferred data and does all its communication as Uint8List objects (bytes). Therefore, the terminator can also be specified in bytes. Many network protocols that transmit binary data use specific byte combinations for their terminator strings.

Finally, the terminator may be null. In the case of a null terminator, all data received over the socket will be piped directly to the data stream.

Getting started

dart pub add tcp_client

If using Flutter:

flutter pub add tcp_client

Usage

import 'package:tcp_client/tcp_client.dart';

// turn on debug mode
TcpClient.debug = false;
var client = await TcpClient.connect('google.com', 80, terminatorString: '\r\n\r\n');

// this will watch the connection status
client.connectionStream.listen(print);

// this will print out all the received data directly
// client.dataStream.listen(print);

// this will transform all received data into strings
client.stringStream.listen(print);

// res will complete with only the first message as delimited by the terminator
// in this case (an HTTP request) that will be the headers only
var res = await client.sendAndWait('''GET / HTTP/1.1\r
Host: google.com\r
User-Agent: curl/7.64.1\r
Keep-Alive: false\r
Accept: */*''');

// res now has the headers
print(res?.body);

// to get the rest of the data (since HTTP doesn't terminate at the end)
client.flush();

// clean up
client.close();

Additional information

Suggestions and contributions are welcome.