Most systems wont handle them correctly and need to ensure they are encoded for the system they are being sent to.
The “ideal” way of handling them is:
set MSH-18 Character Set to the encoding scheme being used.
escape the characters using the C or M escape
See “Escape sequences supporting multiple character sets for PN, XPN, XCN,
XON, and XAD data types” in the hl7 spec for details.
If the application can’t handle escaped characters properly, then you’ll need to send them in whatever encoding scheme they need it in.
Alternatively use a mapping table to translate them to ASCII characters.
Be careful with extended characters, as cloverleaf uses utf-8 by default, so it may change the characters unless no manipulation is done and the thread is set to binary.
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