Question

When the device I am communicating with sends binary data, I can recover most of it. However, there always seem to be some bytes missing, replaced by non-standard characters. For instance, one individual output looks like this:

\xc4\xa5\x06\x00.\xb3\x01\x01\x02\x00\x00\x00=\xa9

The period and equals sign should be traditional bytes in hexadecimal format (I confirmed this in another application). Other times I get other weird characters such as ‘)’ or ‘s’. These characters usually occur in the exact same spot (which varies with the command I passed to the device).

How can I fix this problem?

Answer 1

Are you displaying the output using something like this?:

print output

If some of your bytes happen to correspond with printable characters, they’ll show up as characters. Try this:

print output.encode('hex')

to see hex values for all your bytes.