I run into the following problem when trying encoding an NSString as NSString -> NSData -> NSInputStream and then decode from NSInputStream with read method:
NSString *inputString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%c", 255];
NSData *data = [inputString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSInputStream *stream = [NSInputStream inputStreamWithData:data];
[stream open];
uint8_t bytes;
[stream read:&bytes maxLength:1];
NSLog(@"%i", bytes);
The output is 195 instead of 255. Why?
Because of the kind of encoding you used for the string. UTF-8 is a form of string encoding which will end up converting characters with values above 127 into multi-byte sequences. So although inputString contained a single character, your data object didn't actually contain a single byte as you may have assumed, but multiple (two, in this case) bytes. And when you read from the stream, you only read the first byte of the encoded data, but there was more there.
You didn't need to run the data through the input stream to see this result. Accessing the first byte of the NSData instance would have shown the same thing.
You say that this is a "problem" but you don't suggest what you're trying to actually accomplish. 255 isn't a printable/meaningful text character. If you want to transmit raw data bytes, you can do that directly, rather than using an NSString and string encodings. If you are transmitting strings, then it's already doing the right thing. You just need to be prepared that your data size can exceed your string "length".