Dealing with escape characters

Question

I have a command that works if I represent it as "\003"+command+"\r" because my command needs to be preceded by the char 'x03' and tailed by the char 'x0d'. The literals "\003" and "\r" are being converted as I wish into their equivalent byte values.
If I use Java string variables 'start' and 'end' to hold the values "\003" and "\r" and I issue my command as 'start+command+end', the start and end values are NOT converted into byte values. They remain represented as they are written i.e my string command is preceded by '\003' and ends with '\r'.
How can I convert escape characters stored in string variable into their byte equivalents?
David

Answer 1

Please show us the code, because what you say isn't clear. If the Strings are written as
String start = "\003";  // etx
String end = "\r";   //crIt should work.
Often this sort of thing is easier to do with character variable. eg.
char start = 3;  // etx
char end = 13;  // crI also wonder why you are using etx (end of text) as the start of text, the usual choice would be stx=\002. Also, none of this has anything to do with "byte" values, they are characters and take 2 bytes each. Your network code can do that conversion for you after you choose your character set. Is it UTF8, Latin-1, or some other.