How do you specify a 0xff in a PDL

[Kevan Riley]

I am looking at data that starts with an (0x02) and ends in 6 0xFF’s

“7eff ffffffff ff” (the 7e uis a ‘~’).  I would like to use the same structure as the MLP PDL but substituting the for and teh with something like <0xff><0xff><0xff><0xff><0xff><0xff>.

Something like this:

define phrase basic-msg;

   ;

   field data = variable-array( not( <0xff> ) );

   <0xff>; <0xff>;

   <0xff>; <0xff>;

   <0xff>; <0xff>;

end phrase;

But the 0xff syntax is not allowed, and there is no character name for a 0xFF.

Kevan Riley

AHS-IS

Topic

[Michael Hertel]

Try xff or \ff but are you really sure that’s what you want to use?

0xff is usually filler. (whitespace)

[Kevan Riley]

I am still stuck with this.  

I tried all combinations of single quotes, <>, slashes with and with and with out a leading x or 0x (ie. ff, xff, xff, , , , ‘ff’, ‘xff’, ‘xff’, ‘\ff’, etc).

The issue is that I can’t figure out how to specify the phrase definition.  It has different, none-tcl, rules and syntax.

the message is X12 and begins like this (first 4 columns are the Hex values):

02564030 30303031 4953412a 30302a20   .V@00001ISA*00*

which is great, the leading x02 is an .  But here is the end of the message:

37327e49 45412a31 2a303139 39333136   72~IEA*1*0199316

37327eff ffffffff ff                                      72~……

All I have to work with here are the FF’s.  The 7e is the “~” for the seg terminator.  These are specified in the current source system as three <255>‘s.  I have to emulate this in Cloverleaf (both reading and writing) which would be a piece of cake if I could just specify the ff’s in the PDL phrase definition.  According to all of the example PDL’s I have see they all have a variable-array of the form variable-array( not()).  which, again, would be great if I could just specify the hex xff here.

Kevan Riley

AHS-IS

[Russ Ross]

I would be like you trying everything I could think of that makes since and asking for help.

Perhaps you can try the FF character striaght by generating it and copy/paste it straight into your PDL script and see if that works.

I was able to generate the base 16 FF character ( which is 255 in base 10 and 377 in base 8 ) for copy/paste in an xterm on my AIX box as follows

echo ‘377’

which resulted in displaying the following character

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Russ Ross]

I looked at some of the other PDLs laying around to see if I could find one example of specifying a character outright and I ran across this:

field data = variable-array( not( ‘}’ ) );

using that example you might try this

define phrase basic-msg;

 ;

 field data = variable-array( not( ‘

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Kevan Riley]

Russ, you da’ man!  That worked.  It did not even occur to me to try and produce the “none-printable” character and use that, and I really had my doubts it would actually work in the pdl.  But it does!  the message looks great coming coming in and going out.  Thanks a bunch!  

Here is my code for the phrase definition:

define phrase basic-msg;

   ;

     field data = variable-array( not(‘

[Author]

Replies