AssetManager.AssetInputStream

Returns an estimated number of bytes that can be read or skipped without blocking for more input.

Note that this method provides such a weak guarantee that it is not very useful in practice.

Firstly, the guarantee is "without blocking for more input" rather than "without blocking": a read may still block waiting for I/O to complete — the guarantee is merely that it won't have to wait indefinitely for data to be written. The result of this method should not be used as a license to do I/O on a thread that shouldn't be blocked.

Secondly, the result is a conservative estimate and may be significantly smaller than the actual number of bytes available. In particular, an implementation that always returns 0 would be correct. In general, callers should only use this method if they'd be satisfied with treating the result as a boolean yes or no answer to the question "is there definitely data ready?".

Thirdly, the fact that a given number of bytes is "available" does not guarantee that a read or skip will actually read or skip that many bytes: they may read or skip fewer.

It is particularly important to realize that you must not use this method to size a container and assume that you can read the entirety of the stream without needing to resize the container. Such callers should probably write everything they read to a ByteArrayOutputStream and convert that to a byte array. Alternatively, if you're reading from a file, length() returns the current length of the file (though assuming the file's length can't change may be incorrect, reading a file is inherently racy).

The default implementation of this method in InputStream always returns 0. Subclasses should override this method if they are able to indicate the number of bytes available.

Closes this stream. Concrete implementations of this class should free any resources during close. This implementation does nothing.

Sets a mark position in this InputStream. The parameter readlimit indicates how many bytes can be read before the mark is invalidated. Sending reset() will reposition the stream back to the marked position provided readLimit has not been surpassed.

This default implementation does nothing and concrete subclasses must provide their own implementation.

Indicates whether this stream supports the mark() and reset() methods. The default implementation returns false.

Equivalent to read(buffer, 0, buffer.length).

Reads a single byte from this stream and returns it as an integer in the range from 0 to 255. Returns -1 if the end of the stream has been reached. Blocks until one byte has been read, the end of the source stream is detected or an exception is thrown.

Reads up to byteCount bytes from this stream and stores them in the byte array buffer starting at byteOffset. Returns the number of bytes actually read or -1 if the end of the stream has been reached.

Resets this stream to the last marked location. Throws an IOException if the number of bytes read since the mark has been set is greater than the limit provided to mark, or if no mark has been set.

This implementation always throws an IOException and concrete subclasses should provide the proper implementation.

Skips at most n bytes in this stream. This method does nothing and returns 0 if n is negative, but some subclasses may throw.

Note the "at most" in the description of this method: this method may choose to skip fewer bytes than requested. Callers should always check the return value.

This default implementation reads bytes into a temporary buffer. Concrete subclasses should provide their own implementation.

Invoked when the garbage collector has detected that this instance is no longer reachable. The default implementation does nothing, but this method can be overridden to free resources.

Note that objects that override finalize are significantly more expensive than objects that don't. Finalizers may be run a long time after the object is no longer reachable, depending on memory pressure, so it's a bad idea to rely on them for cleanup. Note also that finalizers are run on a single VM-wide finalizer thread, so doing blocking work in a finalizer is a bad idea. A finalizer is usually only necessary for a class that has a native peer and needs to call a native method to destroy that peer. Even then, it's better to provide an explicit close method (and implement Closeable), and insist that callers manually dispose of instances. This works well for something like files, but less well for something like a BigInteger where typical calling code would have to deal with lots of temporaries. Unfortunately, code that creates lots of temporaries is the worst kind of code from the point of view of the single finalizer thread.

If you must use finalizers, consider at least providing your own ReferenceQueue and having your own thread process that queue.

Unlike constructors, finalizers are not automatically chained. You are responsible for calling super.finalize() yourself.

Uncaught exceptions thrown by finalizers are ignored and do not terminate the finalizer thread. See Effective Java Item 7, "Avoid finalizers" for more.