"/" causing the engine to create an extra field

[Rentian Huang]

Greetings Cloverleafers!!!

– V5.2 on AIX

We recently got an Fetch failure on ‘{IF data fetch produced multiple values.}’ error.

After investigation, we found out that a “/” entered by user was the criminal of the problem. The engine creates another extra field for the “/” entered, causing all subsequence fields to right-shift one position which mess up all data.

Since “/” is NOT the field sep nor does it belongs to any of the encoding charactors, why does the engine do that? Has anyone have the same xp? Any suggested fix??

Thanks in advance!

Sam

Topic

[Terry Kellum]

Many vendors have ignored the part of the HL7 spec that talks about escape sequences for delimiters listed in MSH[2].  

I think that you’ll find that you have problems with users using any of the chars that you have defined in MSH[2].

Two choices.  Beat up the vendor with the HL7 spec….(Or any stout stick..)

(Very satisfying, but does not always work.)

Use TCL on the inbound message data field to REGSUB your worries away.

Please see section 2.9 of the HL7 2.3 standard for escape sequences.

Below code assumes that “” is the escape character, and that “/” is your “Sub Component” delimiter. (position 4 of MSH[2])

Code:

regsub -all {/} $field “T” newfield

Of course, you’ll need to make sure that the vendor of the system on your outbound side supports HL7 escape sequences…

(Whadda wanna bet they don’t….  Grab another stick!)

[Rentian Huang]

Thanks for your input Terry, I will look more into the problem and upd you if I found a solution.

Sam  🙂

[Author]

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