Ignoring Subcomponent Separator?

[Ed Hafner]

Is there any setting in Cloverleaf to have the IE ignore the subcomponent separator in MSH 2?  If so, can it be set at the process level?

The background on this is related to the ambersand ‘&’ character causing issues in various text fields.  We have seen issues w/ ORU and ADT messages.

From what I have found so far on the forum, the solutions are to do some sort of pre proc tcl code or to have the sending system change the ‘&’ to ‘T’.  This seems doable but, it would seem simpler to have Cloverleaf simply ignore the separator if you know that the messages will never contain subcomponents and therefore have no use for the separator.

While searching for solutions, another website states, ‘If there are no subcomponents, then you can omit this character’ (in MSH 2).  The site did not explain what ‘omit’ means or how to ‘omit’ it.  I tried removing it completely and replacing it w/ a ‘ “.  Cloverleaf did not seem to care. It still treated the ‘&’ as the separator.

Any help/input will be appreciated.

Topic

[Chris Williams]

The approach we take is to use a pre-xlate tcl proc to escape the ampersands on a component-by-component basis. We want to escape those ampersands that should be part of the data while still maintaining relevant sub-component separators.

Once you have to tackle Meaningful Use and use OIDs you can wind up with lots of sub-components where you haven

[Mitchell Rawlins]

I agree that escaping on a field-by-field basis is a good general approach.  You might be able to get away with changing the & in MSH-2 to something else (like ` or @); do this on an in-bound Tcl proc.  Cloverleaf won’t interpret & as the subcomponent separator.  You may have to change it back for the downstream systems.  Or they just may assume it’s an ampersand and ignore MSH-2.  

The safest bet is to have a Tcl proc explicitly escape all the ampersands you know are good and leave the rest.  It’s not the only way, though.

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