title: how to plot a list of byte data with matplotlib
body: <p>I've got a bunch of data that I read in from a telnet machine...It's x, y data, but it's just comma separated like <code>x1,y1,x2,y2,x3,y3,...</code></p>
  
  <p>Here's a sample:</p>
  
  <pre><code>In[28] data[1:500]
  Out[28]  b'3.00000000E+007,-5.26880000E+001,+3.09700000E+007,-5.75940000E+001,+3.19400000E+007,-5.56250000E+001,+3.29100000E+007,-5.69380000E+001,+3.38800000E+007,-5.40630000E+001,+3.48500000E+007,-5.36560000E+001,+3.58200000E+007,-5.67190000E+001,+3.67900000E+007,-5.51720000E+001,+3.77600000E+007,-5.99840000E+001,+3.87300000E+007,-5.58910000E+001,+3.97000000E+007,-5.35160000E+001,+4.06700000E+007,-5.48130000E+001,+4.16400000E+007,-5.52810000E+001,+4.26100000E+007,-5.64690000E+001,+4.35800000E+007,-5.3938'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to plot this as a line graph with matplot lib.  I've tried the <code>struct</code> package for converting this into a list of doubles instead of bytes, but I ran into so many problems with that...Then there's the issue of what to do with the scientific notation...I want to obviously perserve the magnitude that it's trying to convey, but I can't just do that by naively swapping the byte encodings to what they would mean with a double encoding.</p>
  
  <p>I'm trying all sorts of things that I would normally try with C, but I can't help but think there's a better way with Python!</p>
  
  <p>I think I need to get the <code>x's</code> and <code>y's</code> into a numpy array and do so without losing any of the exponential notation...</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>