Thank you for your response Andre. I had tried some code like that in the document but it did not seem to work. However ever leaving my terminal for a time the code eventually wrote out the records so apparently there is some very deep buffering going on here. A little more searching on the web revealed the following:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10222788/line-buffered-serial-input It is apparent that pySerial, or at least the documentation is falling short of my needs. It is very unclear what module in the layer is handling the buffering and newlines and so forth. Also unclear is whether the coupled python and OS is reading FIFO or LIFO--something important in quasi realtime scientific applications. This is problematic since the serial port is still so ubiquitous to a lot of scientific instrumentation. I probably will patch up some byte oriented code for this or perhaps write the module in C. Thanks again Fritz -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
