title: Understanding characters received from Arduino
body: <p>I have an Arduino board sending data through a serial port and a Python piece of code reading that data. The Arduino board just sends the temperature it reads from a TMP36 sensor and when I check the port using the port monitor that comes with the Arduino IDE I see this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>20.3
  20.3
  20.2
  20.2
  ...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Which is perfectly correct. Now, when I read the serial port using  Python I get this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>b'20.32\r\n'
  b'20.32\r\n'
  b'20.32\r\n'
  b'20.80\r\n'
  ...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What does that b' ' thing do? How can I treat the string so I just display the numbers correctly?</p>
  
  <p>Here is the code I'm using:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import serial
  
  ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyACM0', 9600)
  while True:
     message = ser.readline()
     print(message)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Apologies if it's a dumb question but I'm new to Arduino, Python and serial programming :)</p>