[ruby-core:125069] [Ruby Feature#20215] Introduce `IO#readable?`

18 Mar 2026

      Issue #20215 has been updated by dotconfig404 (Friedrich Raschwitz).

Id like to second this idea. The incorrect usage of eof? in the net-http lib has caused many debugging hours. Right now there is a long-standing bug in net-http that was very tricky to find due to the ambiguous nature of eof?. Some details can be found here: https://github.com/ruby/net-http/issues/233

and this was just me rediscovering the same thing that was already attempted to be fixed here: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/19017

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Feature #20215: Introduce `IO#readable?`
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20215#change-116773

* Author: ioquatix (Samuel Williams)
* Status: Open
----------------------------------------
There are some cases where, as an optimisation, it's useful to know whether more data is potentially available.

We already have `IO#eof?` but the problem with using `IO#eof?` is that it can block indefinitely for sockets.

Therefore, code which uses `IO#eof?` to determine if there is potentially more data, may hang.

```ruby
def make_request(path = "/")
  client = connect_remote_host
  # HTTP/1.0 request:
  client.write("GET #{path} HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n")

  # Read response
  client.gets("\r\n") # => "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n"

  # Assuming connection close, there are two things the server can do:
  # 1. peer.close
  # 2. peer.write(...); peer.close

  if client.eof? # <--- Can hang here!
    puts "Connection closed"
    # Avoid yielding as we know there definitely won't be any data.
  else
    puts "Connection open, data may be available..."
    # There might be data available, so yield.
    yield(client)
  end
ensure
  client&.close
end

make_request do |client|
  puts client.read # <--- Prefer to wait here.
end
```

The proposed `IO#readable?` is similar to `IO#eof?` but rather than blocking, would simply return false. The expectation is the user will subsequently call `read` which may then wait.

The proposed implementation would look something like this:

```ruby
class IO
  def readable?
    !self.closed?
  end
end

class BasicSocket
  # Is it likely that the socket is still connected?
  # May return false positive, but won't return false negative.
  def readable?
    return false unless super

    # If we can wait for the socket to become readable, we know that the socket may still be open.
    result = self.recv_nonblock(1, MSG_PEEK, exception: false)

    # No data was available - newer Ruby can return nil instead of empty string:
    return false if result.nil?

    # Either there was some data available, or we can wait to see if there is data avaialble.
    return !result.empty? || result == :wait_readable

  rescue Errno::ECONNRESET
    # This might be thrown by recv_nonblock.
    return false
  end
end
```

For `IO` itself, when there is buffered data, `readable?` would also return true immediately, similar to `eof?`. This is not shown in the above implementation as I'm not sure if there is any Ruby method which exposes "there is buffered data".

-- 
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/