I'll reply to you and my own post, as the solution was indeed the ByteArray class.
It was quite simple actually.... 1) create a bytearray 2) writebyte each value into the bytearray 3) output by using by the toString function Data was correctly decoded from the bytearray as a utf8 string, and it worked the first time. Wish I had known this 8 hours ago.... I still am not clear on why I had so much trouble with trying to use strings (why can't I just concatenate the codes?), but this works so I'm not really going to investigate it any further! Thanks
