Question

[mike brown]

I have a message coming in HL7 with xxx-ABCD-xdcs, I want the first 2 characters after the HYPHEN always, so I use this below.

in tcl : set xlateInVals xxx-ABCD-xdcs and I run

set xlateOutVals

4 5]]

returns

AB — this is correct

but what if it comes in like this…

set xlateInVals xxxx-ABCD-xdcs ,

-A not correct .. then the above does not work.

I want the first 2 characters after the first HYPHEN no matter how long the characters are in front of the HYPHEN.

any ideas…?

Topic

[Jim Kosloskey]

Mike,

If you are on 6.0 or later you can utilize 2 STRING Actions.

The first STRING Action would use the split function specifying ‘-‘ as the split character and 2 outbound fields (temp variables for ex @tmp1 and @tmp2).

The second STRING Action would use the substr function against the @tmp2 created above specifying 0 and 1.

Or I am sure there is some sort of regsub expression you can use if you just want to use Tcl. But I am not the person to advise on regsub.

Edited to add comments regarding Tcl split and range…

You could apply the Tcl split command to split the string into a list. The second element of that list is then the field you want to apply your range to.

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

[Levy Lazarre]

Hi Mike,

If you don’t want to use a regular expression, an easy way is to split the string on HYPHEN, take the second component of the resulting list, then take the first two characters of the result:

Code:

string range [lindex [split $xlateInVals -] 1] 0 1

With a regular expression:

Code:

set exp “.*?-(..)”

regexp — $exp $xlateInVals {} $first2chars

$first2chars is the value you are looking for

I hope this helps

[mike brown]

thank you I got it to work…. the replies helped me get it to work, I should say. lol

[Robert Kersemakers]

😈 Always treat xlateInVals and xlateOutVals as a list:

Code:

set xlateOutVals [list [string range [lindex [split [lindex $xlateInVals 0] -] 1] 0 1]]

Zuyderland Medisch Centrum; Heerlen/Sittard; The Netherlands

[mike brown]

thank you all it works beautifully, exactly what I was looking for.

[Author]

Replies