Test files corrupting due to 7edit?

Check to see if your editor is saving the data as a unix or windows file – that might cause an issue.

Welcome to Cloverleaf(R) and the clovertech forum.

You won’t be sorry you are working with Cloverleaf(R) or that you engaged this forum.

I don’t think it is the encoding that is the issue (it might be) but rather the use of Carriage Returns and Line feeds by Windoze at the end of each line versus UNIX just using one of those (I walways have to look up which one UNIX uses).

In UltraEdit (which I use here), you can specify to save the file as a UNIX file.

If you take a msg file that is X0D terminated at segment  ends and x0D x0A terminted at EOF and edit it in 7Edit it preserves X0D terminated at segment  ends but removes the trailing x0A and EOF. after you edit in 7Edit open the file in a HEX editor like XVI32 and insert a x0A at the end of file an dit will work.

Greetings,

For CIS5.6 and above, I have noticed for protocol “fileset/local” for both Inbound and Outbound configuration specifications, there is a CRNL convert option with a drop down list for “CRNL convert” that appears to allow for conversion from Unix style to Windows and vice versa.

Maybe can experiment with it and set up an interface to auto convert the messages?

Just a suggestion as I haven’t played around with it myself.

Enjoy.

If you are FTPing between Windows and Unix, it’s the line terminations that will get you. Native line terminations are:

Unix: x0a (LF, linefeed, newline, ^J)

Windows:  x0dx0a (CRLF, carriage return/linefeed, ^M^J)

Mac: x0d (CR, carriage return, ^M)

HL7 messages are really native to UNIX in that, unlike Windows/DOS and Mac, they use the x0d and x0a for different purposes. x0d is the segment terminator, x0a is the message terminator. In UNIX, an HL7 message is equivalent to a single line. You can display the count of messages in a file by using the UNIX command “wc -l fileName”

We use a tcl proc to handle the conversion/cleanup on files moved from Windows to UNIX. We move them as binary files. You can write your proc in a number of ways, but these steps are what you want to accomplish:

1. Convert anyx0dx0a pairs to x0d by deleting all xa occurrences. You’re file is now comparable to a SMAT .msg file.

2. Convert any x0dx0d strings to a single x0d so you don’t create empty segments.

3. Convert any string of x0dMSH to x0dx0aMSH. This will put in all the correct message terminators except for the last message which will be terminated correctly by closing the file you are writing in your tcl proc.

Don’t punish yourself by trying to use an editor to fix the messages by hand.

Here are a couple of scripts I use to convert DOS files to Unix files and vice versa:

dos_to_unix.ksh

unix_to_dos.ksh

I also find the cloverleaf backend command ( hcihd ) usefull to determine what are the line termination characters so I can see exactly how the file is foo-barred.