pyserial - how to continuously read and parse

Question

I'm trying to capture data from a hardware device that's connected via usb to my linux computer that's running ubuntu. Here's the very simple script I currently have:

import serial
ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUB0', 9600)
s = ser.read(10000)
print(s)

1. How do I make this print continuously?
2. The data is coming through in hexadecimal which I'd like to interpret. Should I have the continuous data save to a text file and then have another script analyze? Essentially, I'm trying to build a sniffer to grab the data and interpret.

Thanks for your help! I'm a newbie :)

Answer 1

1) Just put the read and print within a while True: section.

Example:

import serial
ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUB0', 9600)
while True:
    s = ser.read(10000)
    print(s)

Checkout another answer for some more info if you need to sniff both send and receive. https://stackoverflow.com/a/19232484/3533874

2) For speed I would save the data without processing to a file and have the other script do the decoding/processing of the hex data. Make sure you write to the file in binary mode.

Example:

import serial
ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUB0', 9600)

# This will just keep going over and over again
with open('hexdatafile.dat', 'wb') as datafile:
    datafile.write(ser.read(10000))