Sorry i am late getting back on this. ord() is finally what is giving me what i wanted. the vendor told me that what was comming in was an ascii string representing hex characters. So i expected when i used the serial module that what i would be getting was something along the lines of 4A, 3D, etc.. but i got weird characters. So then (with the help of this very thread) discovered that i am reading raw bytes. i am supposed to validate the bytes as they come in because the message comes in four at a time. and i validate each byte like this var = (validation number) a = ser.read(1) x = ord(a) then to validate : x = (x & var)
I am really sorry about the confusion. i am really new at this. but i am getting what i am supposed to now. i dont have the details on the script, because it is at work. but i will post it monday. thanks for everything. i would still be banging my head if not for this thread -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
