This article was originally written for Iguana 5 so it contains version 5 screenshots, and may contain out of date references.

Kinda funny. After writing an article about A,B,C’s, Kanji and Orthogonality on Monday it did seem about time to get on with actually trying the Translator on Kanji. As if by magic a customer popped up during the day with an issue of viewing Kanji in Chameleon.

Chameleon can parse Kanji. But it’s not good at displaying parsed Kanji – hey the product dates back to 1997 – I couldn’t spell Kanji then.

The core of Iguana 4 can handle Kanji using Chameleon vmd files. The way it works is this:

Kanji Encoded Data –> LLP listener converts to UTF8 -> Chameleon parses UTF8 etc.

All good.

Originally I thought our HL7 Simulator doesn’t handle Kanji but I was wrong. It does. The Iguana Translator does a great job of handling Kanji. It does it beautifully – here’s a screen shot:

You can try out Iguana with Kanji yourself using this message:

MSH|^~&|LIS||||201104121738||ADT^O21|H11-00001|P|2.4|
PID|||0000000000||テスト^患者１||19130331|M|
ORC|NW|H11-00001|
OBR|1|H11-00001 1 4 1||401A^HER2^STAIN|||201009030000|||||||201101121356|||||H11-00001;1;4;1^1|H11-00001;1;4^4|H11-00001;1^1| 
ORC|NW|H11-00001|
OBR|2|H11-00001 1 4 2||402B^HER2FISH^STAIN|||201009030000|||||||201101121356|||||H11-00001;1;4;2^2|H11-00001;1;4^4|H11-00001;1^1|
ORC|NW|H11-00001|
OBR|3|H11-00001 1 5 1||401A^HER2^STAIN|||201009030000|||||||201101121356|||||H11-00001;1;5;1^1|H11-00001;1;5^5|H11-00001;1^1|
ORC|NW|H11-00001|
OBR|4|H11-00001 1 5 2||402B^HER2FISH^STAIN|||201009030000|||||||201101121356|||||H11-00001;1;5;2^2|H11-00001;1;5^5|H11-00001;1^1|

This is encoded in UTF-8. I tried it out. I set up a LLP to Translator instance, and set the encoding to UTF-8:

I set up the simulator to feed into channel and et voila: