[Tutor] how to read over serial port

[Lie Ryan]

On Mon, 03 Nov 2008 08:48:44 -0600, shawn bright wrote:

> ok, i have another question:
> if i run this:
> #!/usr/bin/env python
> f = 'test_out'
> f = open(f, 'r').read()
> for i in f:
>     print ord(i)
> 
> I get this:
> 0
> 6
> 0
> 58
> 128
> 31
> 22
> 103
> 74
> 115
> 222
> 192
> 74
> 115
> 222
> 192  (deleted some in the email for brevity)
> 
> if i do
> for i in f:
>     print chr(ord(i))
> i get the same weird characters.
> should these be read some other way?

Wait... are these "weird" characters in the form of:
����������������������

or if you used "print repr(chr(ord(i)))": "\x87\x88\x89\x8a\x8b\x8c\x8d
\x8e\x8f\x90\x91"

That is python's escape characters. Python's default byte-to-character 
encoding is ASCII, a 7-bit encoding, values in the range(128, 256) cannot 
be represented in ASCII so python uses � to represent these 
unrepresentable characters. If you used repr(), it would escape the 
unrepresentable characters into an escaped form, using '\xkk' where kk is 
the two-digit hexadecimal representing the byte value of the character