In Windows hardware and virtual serial ports have the same enumeration scheme, so they will be COM. The problem is that only one program at time (theorically) can use a Serial port, so if the port is used by your Python program, it won't be available to the terminal.
You should setup a fake COM, and this mean a custom driver... too much difficult.
Socket, file and standard input can be read/written one byte a time, so you can test your parser using them.