Stripping non-alphabetic characters out of a field

[Misti Wannamaker]

I need to strip non-alphabetic characters out of the last name field.  We have STAR and we are sending records to our lab system, Misys.  Misys won’t accept non-alphabetic characters in the last name field.  How do I do this?

Thanks for any help.

Misti R. Wannamaker

Systems Analyst

TRMC

803.395.2806

mrwannamaker@regmed.com

Topic

[Robert Milfajt]

regsub -all {[^A-Z,a-z]} $x “” y

ought to do the trick, where x is the input string and y is the output string.

Hope this helps,

Bob

Robert Milfajt
Northwestern Medicine
Chicago, IL

[Misti Wannamaker]

Thanks for responding.  I’ll try it.

[Traci Zee]

As a corollary:

How do I substitute ” for all characters out of a string that are > 0x7e?

I’ve tried: regsub -all {[\x7e-\xff]} $str {“} outstr

and it errors with:

couldn’t compile regular expression pattern: invalid [] range

   while executing

“regsub -all {[\x7e-\xff]} $str {“} outstr”

I can’t get the right syntax for the hex values in the range.

TIA!

Traci Zee

770.844.9242

Emdeon, Inc.

[Jim Kosloskey]

Traci,

I think you might have too many .

Try this:

regsub -all {[x7e-xff]} $str {“} outstr

That seemed to work for me in hcitcl.

Sure hope this isn’t HL/7; you get a 2 byte string which converts to “”; and the receiving system is sensitive to Active Null.

Jim Kosloskey

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

[Jamin Gray]

Robert Milfajt wrote:

regsub -all {[^A-Z,a-z]} $x “” y

ought to do the trick, where x is the input string and y is the output string.

Hope this helps,

Bob

This will also leave commas in the field.  If the system barks at anything but alphas you might want to change it to:

Code:

regsub -all {[^A-Za-z]} $x {} y

or

Code:

regsub -all -nocase {[^a-z]} $x {} y

[Author]

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