binary data from serial port?

[nbort]

I want to be able to read binary data from a serial port using labview. The packets are of known length (in even bytes) but they are not ascii. I am worried that if i read them as ascii first and then try to convert, there will be problems such as with special characters appearing

[Mads]

If your thinking about the fact that the output of the serial VIs are strings then don't worry. Strings can hold all types of data, it's not the same as ASCII. If the data is binary you can use the unflatten function, type cast or the string to byte array function to convert it to other data types. If you are using VISA make sure it's not set to treat any characters as a termination character.