What's the best way to consume messages from a starting offset to an ending offset? It seems the low level consumer (API), kafka-simple-consumer-shell.sh, and kafkacat offer an option to consume from a starting offset, but there's no option to tell it to stop consuming after a given offset. One has to manually determine/track that (by figuring out the current offset after fetching messages until the end offset is reached/surpassed).
Alternatively, is there a way, given a starting and ending offset, to determine how many messages exist in between? Since kafka-simple-consumer-shell.sh and kafkacat have option to consume up to N messages, so it could stop properly if one can figure out # messages between offsets. Has anyone done work in this area or can provide tips on what to do?
