Listing serial (COM) ports on Windows?
- by Eli Bendersky
Hello,
I'm looking for a robust way to list the available serial (COM) ports on a Windows machine. There's this post about using WMI, but I would like something less .NET specific - I want to get the list of ports in a Python or a C++ program, without .NET.
I currently know of two other approaches:
Reading the information in the HARDWARE\\DEVICEMAP\\SERIALCOMM registry key. This looks like a great option, but is it robust? I can't find a guarantee online or in MSDN that this registry cell indeed always holds the full list of available ports.
Tryint to call CreateFile on COMN with N a number from 1 to something. This isn't good enough, because some COM ports aren't named COMN. For example, some virtual COM ports created are named CSNA0, CSNB0, and so on, so I wouldn't rely on this method.
Any other methods/ideas/experience to share?
Edit: by the way, here's a simple Python implementation of reading the port names from registry:
import _winreg as winreg
import itertools
def enumerate_serial_ports():
""" Uses the Win32 registry to return a iterator of serial
(COM) ports existing on this computer.
"""
path = 'HARDWARE\\DEVICEMAP\\SERIALCOMM'
try:
key = winreg.OpenKey(winreg.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, path)
except WindowsError:
raise IterationError
for i in itertools.count():
try:
val = winreg.EnumValue(key, i)
yield (str(val[1]), str(val[0]))
except EnvironmentError:
break
