Parsing GPS sentence

[jiemde]

Hi all,

Since 3 days I try to select the right sentence ( $GPRMC ) from an GPS via the uart.
When I use the readline(), no problems all the sentences are read one by one, except that when I print them there is a "b" as the first character of the line.
When I try to identify the good sentence by:

while True:
cad=uart.readline(7) #just read the first 7 characters of the sentence
if (cad == '$GPRMC,'): # compare these 7 characters to $GPRMC,
data=uart.readline() #read the rest of the line for parsing it later

That don't work!
Is there a way for not having the "b" in front of the extracted line ?
See somewhere that tha "b" is displaying by micropython to say that's a binary result.

If someone can help me ?

Best regards

Jiemde

[dhylands]

You need to understand the difference between unicode strings and binary strings. Strings with a b prefix are binary strings, and strings without a b prefix are unicode strings.

Code: Select all

>>> 'abc' == b'abc'
False

Reading from a uart returns a binary string, so you should either compare it with a binary string or convert it to a unicode string in order to compare it:

Code: Select all

>>> 'abc' == b'abc'.decode('utf-8')
True

So you should change your comparison from:

Code: Select all

if (cad == '$GPRMC,'):

to be

Code: Select all

if (cad == b'$GPRMC,'):

instead.

[pythoncoder]

I think you need to read up on Python3 and Unicode. The preceding b denotes a bytes object which is a sequence of 8 bit quantities. In Python3 this is not the same as a string, which is a sequence of Unicode characters. To perform a comparison the types must match. To convert from a string to bytes, do the following:

Code: Select all

>>> s = 'Rats. And more rats.'
>>> s
'Rats. And more rats.'
>>> s.encode('UTF-8')
b'Rats. And more rats.'
>>> 

As you might guess, the reverse operation can be performed with a matching encode() function.

[jiemde]

Thanks!
When trying the news comparison in the Micropython console of Pymakr, that's work fine, but not yet in the main.py ?
But today I'm tired an try again tomorrow morning !
Regards

Jiemde

[pythoncoder]

@jiemde The documentation for UART.readline() method http://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/w ... T.readline makes no mention of an argument. Are you sure

Code: Select all

cad=uart.readline(7) #just read the first 7 characters of the sentence

actually works? I'd have written

Code: Select all

cad = uart.readline()

and then used

Code: Select all

cad[0:7]

to extract the first 7 characters.

[jiemde]

Hi Pythoncoder,

it's work!, you get the same answer, but in one line instead of 2.
And when you use the uart.readline() again, you get the rest of the line.

regards

Jiemde