Special Characters in Free Form fields (ORU)

[mike brown]

I am having a issue in cloverleaf with users entering special characters in the FREE FORM message fields of the ORU OBX:5 text.

I am trying to write a proc to filter or “regsub -all” the special characters, but this is not working. Is there a list of the special characters I can give the users, that would identify what they should not use in the free form fields. I know a few and I think there are more. (@, &….).

thanks in advance.

mike

Topic

[Max Drown (Infor)]

Anything in MSH.02 of the message should not be included in the message unless it is used as a delimiter. Also, consider using string map instead of regsub for the replacements.

-- Max Drown (Infor)

[Jim Kosloskey]

Mike,

Also try to take care of things like tab and CR and LF characters. Sometimes users hit those keys to make their display look pretty and they get passed along.

Actually, the sending system should escape any characters that are in MSH-1 or MSH-2 following the HL/7 standard just as Max suggested if they want to claim to be HL/7 compliant. So it sometimes doesn’t hurt to ask if the Sending System (vendor or in-house) can do that.

It has surprised me sometimes when I ask that question that the sending system does have that configuration option but it just is not set.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com

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