Need to add CR at the end of each segment

[Yvonne Gaffney]

Does anyone have a script that will add a CR at the end of each segment?

Thanks  😯

Topic

[James Cobane]

Yvonne,

If your segments aren’t already terminated/delimited with a CR, how are your segments delimited so that you know it is a segment?

James Cobane

Henry Ford Health

[Yvonne Gaffney]

Maybe I should take the time to explain what we are trying to do, since there could be another solution.

Took a flat file and translated it to hl7, but we did not want all of the records to go to into the database.  I copied the hl7 messages (hcidbdump) to a file which was then given to the user.  They went through the file and removed the messages they did not want to send.  Now they tried using both word and wordpad for this task.  When they save the file and we put it back on the Cloverleaf we are missing the control character; in some cases we lost the CR (word) and in others we lost the NL (wordpad).  Either way, I am trying to figure out how we can do this with some sanity.

Suggestions on how to save this file without loosing the control characters or the best approach at putting them back in is appreciated.  

Thanks ❓

[Elisha Gould]

assuming there is no new lines that need to be in the message a quick solution is:

cat file.txt | awk ‘/^MSH/{printf “n%s”,$0} !/^MSH/{printf “r%s”,$0} ‘ > file.msg

This produces a new line separated message file.

just as a note might want to delete the first blank line after running this.

[Charlie Bursell]

My guess is Windows was trying to be your “friend” and put line feeds to go with the carriage returns.  A simple approach use perl.  If there are multiple records it may take two commands

perl -pi -e ‘s/n//g’  file

Then to put linefeeds back after each record

perl -pi -e ‘s/rMSH/rnMSH/g’ file

Note that file could be a single file like hl7.dat or multiple files like *.dat

assumes Unix

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