This topic contains 1 reply, has 2 voices, and was last updated by  Jeff Drumm 6 years, 10 months ago.

Extended ASCII message delimiters

  • rcwoodley May 6, 2016 at 4:02 pm

    We have a vendor that wants to use an ASCII 172 (¬) character as the component delimiter. The VMD that I’m using doesn’t have an “other” message type defined, but if standard delimiters were to be used for this same message, none would be needed. The error I get when trying to parse with this delimiter is:

    Message type is unidentified. Hint: the value of MSH.9 is “ADT”.
    Often this means that a new message needs to be defined, that the identifier fields
    were in the wrong place, or that the values were different from what was expected,
    e.g., wrong case or a zero character instead of the letter ‘O’.
    You can add a default message handler in Chameleon’s option screen which will be
    invoked every time an unidentified message is encountered. See the manual for details.

    If I use the standard delimiters, the message parses fine. I’ve also tried using # as the component delimiter; this also works. Has anyone else come across this? If so, do you have a good way of dealing with it? I’d like to avoid having to use string replacement functions to “fix” the delimiters before parsing the message.

    Jeff Drumm May 7, 2016 at 9:47 am

    Hi Ron (and apologies if this isn’t Ron Woodley :)),

    I Hope you’ve been well; it’s been a while since we’ve talked.

    Unfortunately, Iguana doesn’t seem to honor the delimiters specified in the VMD in either hl7.parse() or hl7.message(). Your only real option is to do a bit of pre-processing on the message prior to turning it over to hl7.parse().

    Fortunately, Lua is pretty speedy at this sort of thing so there isn’t a significant penalty in doing it.

    Jeff Drumm ◊ VP and COO ◊ HICG, LLC. ◊ http://www.hicgrp.com

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