HL7 Help

Garry,

I am assuming you are referring to field PRA-5 (00689) Specialty – 2.3.1 HL/7.

This is a CM type field so you can simply place the specialties in each component as you described. There is no need to change the field.

However, the standard length is 100 bytes so you might want to change that to assure you have sufficient room.

Jim Kosloskey

Garry,

You could use the regsub command to change the & to a ^ for that particular field.

Dorian

My $0.02

A change like this is best done with the string map command.

The problem is that sometimes you don’t know or care what the character is but you want to make sure it is what you want.  All you will deal with is the character at index 3, 4, etc.

If you use regsub, you never know if the character is a regsub special character.  For example, the ^ character is the character that anchors the expression to the beginning of a string.  To regsub it, you would have to escape it.  With the new regular expression engine, it is an error to escape a non-special character.

So you are better off to use string map which requires no escaping.  For example, assume you want to change the subfield separator to : throughout the message.

set msg [string map “[string index $msg 4] :” $msg]

Charlie

Garry,

Even if the vendor does not comply, you can still place as many components in a CE type field as you want (limited by the size) within an Xlate.

You simply need to use the proper notation (such as: 0(0).PID(0).00118(0).[0] or .[1] or .[2] etc).

If you are obtaining the source specialty through an iterate, then possibly use the iteration counter inside the square brackets.

I have tested this (not the iteration part but it is worth trying) and the Xlate creates as many as I want (again considering the length).

I hope this helps,

Jim Kosloskey

Garry,

That’s good.

Were you using an ITERATE to collect the specialties?

If so did you try using the iteration counter in the component portion of the field address path and did that work?

Thanks,

Jim Kosloskey