I was under the impression that the Serial.Available was in sorts a boolean type as that is how it appears when used in code (if serial.available = True or False then process x).
Poor examples, then.
Serial.available() returns the number of bytes available to read. This works as a boolean test, since 0 is false and everything else is true, but I don't like code written this way.
So if there is no serial data in the buffer what does the Serial.avaiable() return?
- Zero. Zip. Zilch.
If not 0, which is apparently the first byte of the serial packet. is it "" or just empty?
It is zero, but, if you call Serial.read() anyway, it returns -1.
By the way, you have the source code for all the Arduino functions/classes, so you could look at the code or the documentation, instead of making assumptions.