Looking for information about GE Muse results encoding

[Jason Alexander]

I am in the unenviable position of trying to decode a GE Muse result without documentation (backfilling for another programmer at our site).

Looking at the information they have sent, I deduce the following…

They take a PDF file and uuencode it.  As near as I can tell, they then (on a windows box, since it makes a difference in the ASCII output) take the ouput file and do a pass looking for restricted characters and convert them to HL7-delimited hexadecimal.  The resulting field has lots of X0D\X0A combinations all over it.

So, my task is to take this field (subcomponent actually) and write it out to a file and try to decode it.  The problem I am having is that I am unable to get it to decode cleanly.

I have taken the subcomponent and run perl against it to convert the hexadecimal back into ASCII.  Now I *should* have a clean uuencoded file (with x0dx0a at the end of a line) which I should be able to decode somewhere.  I’ve tried decoding both on UNIX (AIX, uudecode after removing x0d characters) and Windows (XP Pro,WinZip).  No dice.  Both result in corrupted PDF files.

Anyone currently decoding GE Muse results and able to point out what I am missing?  Or perhaps able to suggest an alternative method of decoding?

Topic

[Jason Alexander]

More information now apparent…

Instead of converting everything to hexadecimal (which would allow one-pass decoding) they converted some things to hexadecimal and some to standard HL7 escape sequences.  Now all I have to do is figure out what order to decode things in so that the files come out clean.

[Dennis Pfeifer]

perform the HL7 decode first, then the uudecode ..

I think you answered your own question .. you were not decoding the other HL7 encryptions ..

Dennis

[Jason Alexander]

The issue that I am running into is that they have generated the file in such a way that you cannot do pattern matching.  The string that taught me this painful lesson was

M>teYESSEX0D\X0A

No way to order your decoding of the escape sequences (if you’re pattern matching) so that this decodes correctly.  It’s got to be done by reading the string character-at-a-time and decoding escape sequences as they occur.

[Dennis Pfeifer]

Yap .. that’s how decoding should be done .. reading and processing the string as you go .. else  you will get ‘false’ patterns.

Dennis

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