How to display an entire incoming string from the serial monitor in arduino ide?

Question

this is my first question in this forum.

I need to receive a string from the Arduino serial monitor and display it when the communication is over. I have a similar problem like the one discussed in this thread:

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/45543/how-do-i-receive-an-entire-string-as-opposed-to-1-character-at-a-time-on-the-ard

Only I'm using the Arduino serial monitor instead of a RaspberryPi to send strings so I can't program the sender to attach an identifier like '\n' at the end of the string.

char inData[20];
char inChar=-1;
byte index = 0;
while (Serial.available() > 0){
 ending[1]=ending[1]+1;
 if(index < 19){
 inChar = Serial.read();
 inData[index] = inChar;
 index++;
 inData[index] = '0円';
 Serial.flush(); 
 }
 Serial.print(inData);Serial.print("\t");Serial.println();
}

What I receive in the console looks like this:

M
Me 
Mes 
Mess 
Messa 
Messag
Message

I need to display only the final string

Message

The code has to know when the incoming string ended and then display it once.

I'd really appreciate any help I can get.

• Edgar Bonet: You have two options. The most reliable is to decide that a particular character will serve as an end-of-message indicator. \n is a common choice, but you can choose whatever you are not going to use in the message itself. The other option is to have a timeout: if no further characters have been received for XXX ms, then assume the message is complete.

Answer 1

If you really want a string. Try using Serial.readString(). It will return the full string.

The code could look like this:

if(Serial.available() > 0)
{
 String message = Serial.readString();
 Serial.println(message);
}

• Edgar Bonet: It is worth noting that Stream::readString() works with a timeout, which is 1 second by default, but can be changed with setTimeout().
• Daniel Maydana: Thank you, that's exactly what I needed. Now the output in the serial monitor is the entire text input. First post, first issue solved. I'm really grateful.