How to handle special characters in message field?

We are receiving HL7 messages that sometimes have HL7 Separator Characters, i.e. ‘&’ imbedded in a field, i.e. RXE.GiveIndication. Is there a way to convert these special characters prior to the message being parsed into its segments (Which results in the field being broken into 2 separate fields)?

I’ve looked at the code repository examples on how to prevent escaping of special characters, but it appears that these examples are converting from \T\ back to &.

Chuck

Yes, in this situation you’d need to pre-process the message before handing it off to hl7.parse(). The challenge is to know where it’s safe to do this. Since RXE-27 in HL7 v2.3.1 (I didn’t check later versions) doesn’t define subcomponent fields, you should be OK here.

Here’s an unpolished example; the magic happens in the fixRXE() function:

function main(Data)
   local msgData = fixRXE(Data)
   local M,mType,mErr = hl7.parse{data=msgData,vmd='PHRM-HL7-V04.vmd'} -- parse message
   -- message transformation code goes here
end

function fixRXE(D)
   local msgData = D
   local segList = msgData:split('\r') -- split segments into a segment table
   for i=1,#segList do -- iterate through the segments
      if segList[i]:match('^RXE') then -- look for RXE segment
         local fldList = segList[i]:split('|') -- split RXE segment into a field table
         fldList[28] = fldList[28]:gsub('&','\\T\\') -- replace Give Indication '&' with escaped version
         segList[i] = table.concat(fldList,'|') -- reassemble RXE segment
      end
   end
   return table.concat(segList,'\r') -- reassemble message
end

You’ll notice that RXE-27 is referenced as element 28 of the fldList table. That’s because the RXE segment ID ends up in element 1, which creates an offset of 1 as compared to HL7’s numbering scheme vs. the resulting table.

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

Jeff —

Your ‘unpolished’ example worked without any changes required!

Not only did you save me the development time, but you gave me great insight into how to approach the problem of where in the flow to do the cleanup.

Thanks much!

Chuck

Hi Jeff and Chuck,

I took the example code and recrafted it a little to make it a little more general and published it as a channel in the Iguana-Protocols Github repository:

https://github.com/interfaceware/iguana-protocols/commit/bd3186a35fd6821d7cc71e1f4f435fd3dbb04529

This shows the usage:

https://github.com/interfaceware/iguana-protocols/blob/master/HL7_-_Illegal_embedded_chars-To-VC9LEGJN0BE9jk/main.lua

Enjoy!

Thanks, Eliot; I appreciate the attribution too.

And if you’re wondering who submitted the change to fix my last name, that was me 🙂

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

We needed to be able to cleanup a variety of special characters, so I wrote a method that can do multiple replacements with one call. Rather than write a separate line to do the gsub(), just provide a comma-separated list of characters you want escaped:

         fldList[28] = Escape(fldList[28], '&,~')

function Escape(segment, escapes)
   local escapeList = escapes:split(',')
   for i=1, #escapeList do
      local escape = escapeList[i]
      if escape == '&' then
         segment = segment:gsub('&','\\T\\')
      elseif escape == '|' then
         segment = segment:gsub('|','\\F\\')
      elseif escape == '^' then
         -- Remove the code that splits the field 
         -- into multiple elements
         segment = segment:gsub('\\^','')
         trace(segment)
      elseif escape == '~' then
         segment = segment:gsub('~','\\R\\')
      elseif escape == '\\' then
         -- Remove the escape separator
         segment = segment:gsub('\\','')
      elseif escape == '\.br' then
         -- Remove the <br>
         segment = segment:gsub('\.br',' ')      
      elseif escape == 'trim' then
         -- Trims white space on both sides
         segment = string.trimWS(segment)    
      elseif escape == 'compact' then
         -- Replace multiple spaces with single spaces 
         segment = string.compactWS(segment)
      else
         local msg = 'Invalid escape: '..escape
         trace(msg)
         iguana.logWarning(msg)
      end
   end
   return segment
end

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Chuck