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#### Streams, Short Reads and Short Writes

Many I/O objects in Boost.Asio are stream-oriented. This means that:

- There are no message boundaries. The data being transferred is a continuous sequence of bytes.
- Read or write operations may transfer fewer bytes than requested. This is referred to as a short read or short write.

Objects that provide stream-oriented I/O model one or more of the following type requirements:

- `SyncReadStream`, where synchronous read operations are performed using a member function called `read_some()`.
- `AsyncReadStream`, where asynchronous read operations are performed using a member function called `async_read_some()`.
- `SyncWriteStream`, where synchronous write operations are performed using a member function called `write_some()`.
- `AsyncWriteStream`, where synchronous write operations are performed using a member function called `async_write_some()`.

Examples of stream-oriented I/O objects include `ip::tcp::socket`, `ssl::stream<>`, `posix::stream_descriptor`, `windows::stream_handle`, etc.

Programs typically want to transfer an exact number of bytes. When a short read or short write occurs the program must restart the operation, and continue to do so until the required number of bytes has been transferred. Boost.Asio provides generic functions that do this automatically: `read()`, `async_read()`, `write()` and `async_write()`.

###### Why EOF is an Error

- The end of a stream can cause `read`, `async_read`, `read_until` or `async_read_until` functions to violate their contract. E.g. a read of N bytes may finish early due to EOF.
- An EOF error may be used to distinguish the end of a stream from a successful read of size 0.

###### See Also

async_read(), async_write(), read(), write(), AsyncReadStream, AsyncWriteStream, SyncReadStream, SyncWriteStream.