[Tutor] Scan Codes, Character Sets: Any Modules?

[doug shawhan]

 The difficulty I have may or may not be something that may be easily
handled with pyserial and some other mystery module.

 I am attempting to screen scrape SuperDOS, an extremely closed system that
uses wyse 60 terminals to communicate with a dos machine. I have not been
able to communicate properly with superdos until trying the handy
miniterm.py example from the pyserial package in conjunction with Markus
Gutschke's wy60 emulator which translates input through an xterm into wyse
60 commands. These programs together allow me to interact with superdos
pretty well ... with the exception of the arrow keys: for those I must fall
back to the old cntl-letter combos to get the cursor to behave (actually
cntl-letter x 2.. for some reason it likes an extra prod). This is fine, as
now I have a way to debug my eventual script. My big problem is,  I am
completely unable to get SuperDos to respond to my carriage returns from
within the script!

I can watch the script work via miniterm.py. I have sent the return and
newline characters in various combinations starting with "\n,\r",
"\x0a\x0d", but they respond weirdly, putting the cursor *above* the
existing command line, changing the cursor to an outline and generally
letting me know that I am on the wrong track.

Has some clever human alread created a handy module to handle wyse60 and
other terminal emulation from within a python program? I have looked over
the curses module, but it seems to be aimed at drawing proper screens for
the user, not translation. PySerial's ability to suck up the output via
readlines() is awesome, and I can see how I *think* it should all be done,
but the weirdness has got me stymied! I am going to look at Mr. Gutscheke's
source to see how he does it, but I am barely conversant in python and fear
that exposure to that much C code may cause dizziness!

Thanks!
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