HL7 and tcl utilities

[Brandon Grudt]

All,

I was wondering if anyone had any good utilites that they use in the course of their work day.  I use a couple pieces of freeware called SmartHL7 and WinMerge.  SmartHL7 allows you to paste HL7 messages into it and it breaks down and defines fields. WinMerge is something I use to compare two HL7 messages to see what differences there are in the formatting.  I’m interested in anything that makes life easier as an interface analyst, and if you don’t have the two programs I’ve described, I suggest you try them out.

Links:

http://smarthl7.com/

http://winmerge.org/

Topic

[Jim Kosloskey]

I use the engine for viewing messages (HL/7 Tester) but also provide QuickView HL/7 for Trading Partners who do not have a viewer. It also is free.

For comparison I use either sdiff or UltraCompare but mostly UltraCompare.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[Terry Kellum]

UltraEdit/UltraCompare are my constant companions.  I also use Komodo to edit TCL files.  Komodo helps to keep all my brackets straight and the colored highlighting helps as well.

[Jim Kosloskey]

Terry,

UltraEdit can do the same if you download the Wordfile from UltraEdit (free).

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[James Cobane]

I use UltraEdit, ExamDiff Pro, KomodoEdit among a few others.

I like KomodoEdit because it’s free and especially works well when trying to edit HL7 files on the server.

[Max Drown (Infor)]

gVim for Windows (vi) is my personal favorite editor for HL7 (or anything). It’s free.

I’ve heard good things about Interface Explorer, but have never used it myself.

Take a look at my HL7 parsing scripts linked in my signature. These have been massively help to me over the years.

-- Max Drown (Infor)

[David Barr]

I use Cygwin both for a terminal connection to the Cloverleaf server (mintty/openssh) as well as utilities for viewing and editing files locally.

On the server I often use awk for making reports on the contents of message files. For example:

Code:

< file.msg tr '15' '12' | awk -F| '/^EVN/ { evn=$2 } /^PV1/ { print evn, $19 }'

It might look ugly, but once you get used to it it’s pretty simple and powerful.

[Author]

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