How to get rid of the empty remaining of the buffer?

Question

I have a server-client application that is using a datagram socket to exchange messages. I have initially set the buffer size to be 1024 bytes because I dont know the length of the messages. When I send something that is shorter than 1024 bytes I get the rest of my string displayed as some weird characters (null characters or I am not sure how they are called). Here is a screen:

Client code: byte[] buf = ("This is another packet.\n").getBytes(); DatagramPacket packet = new DatagramPacket(buf, buf.length, inetAddress, serverport); socket.send(packet)

Server code: byte[] buf = new byte[1024]; DatagramPacket packet = new DatagramPacket(buf, buf.length); socket.receive(packet);

Answer 1

Ok so I came up with a solution that worked for me:

    public String getRidOfAnnoyingChar(DatagramPacket packet){
        String result = new String(packet.getData());
        char[] annoyingchar = new char[1];
        char[] charresult = result.toCharArray();
        result = "";
        for(int i=0;i<charresult.length;i++){
            if(charresult[i]==annoyingchar[0]){
                break;
            }
            result+=charresult[i];
        }
        return result;
    }

EDIT: There exists a better solution using ByteArrayOutputStream which can be found here: How to reinitialize the buffer of a packet?