Parsing formatted text

How do we build a simple function to extract information from plain text file?

Say we wish to split by empty lines, indicating new paragraphs:

Or we can for split by a substring:

• Search for the header string, for example “PAST MEDICAL HISTORY”
• Extract the information out after the colon
• Use each paragraph as values for say numerous OBX-5 fields in HL7 message

Or we can for split by several substrings:

• Search for the header string, for example “MEDICATIONS”
• Extract the medicines information out after the colon
• Use medicines names as values for HL7 messages

The project can be imported from this zip file Parse_text_file.zip, the test data is included.

Functions string.split() and string.trimRAnyC() could be included in any module, we included then in stringutil, as it seems like a good candidate.