Xlate pre proc code?

[Mark Perschbacher]

Can anyone tell me why this code when used as a pre-proc in an xlate will work for everything but ~’s?

set code [lindex $xlateInVals 0]

set xlateOutVals

]

Topic

[Ed Mastascusa]

If ~ is one of your HL7 delimiters,

echoing $code will probably show that the 0th element of your xlateInVals list is going to be everything to the left of the (first) ‘~’. The delmiiters will split your xlateInVals list and won’t actually show up in the xlateInVals list elements.

The only way I know to remove unwanted delimiters is in a tps proc, not an xlt proc.

[Mark Perschbacher]

Ed, yes ~’s are the delimiter our lab system uses to indicate new line.  So if I create a proc that is called within an xlate, should that work?

[Ed Mastascusa]

Mark,

If you know that you only have “~”s in the data at the front end of the copy you could do somthing like this inside the xlt proc. This fails if there are ^s or &s spiltting up the incoming list.

set outVal “”

foreach val $xlateInVals {

  append outVal $val “~”

}

set outVal [ string trimright $outVal ~ ]   ;# remove trailing  s or ~s

set xlateOutVals [ list  [string map “~ { }” $outVal ] ]

depending on what you are trying to do, a pre/post tps proc may be more straightforward – that’s where we invariably do this sort of scrubbing when the data isn’t quite HL7.

[Mark Perschbacher]

Ed, I went ahead and inserted it as an xlate CALL, and it worked.  The only problem is since the ~’s are deliminters, when the xlate converts the proc output back to the outval, it still inserts the ~’s.  I am thinking that running a similar proc on the thread after it is xlated might be the way to go.  I am also testing another proc I pulled from Clovertech that truncates the OBX-5 if it is greater than 68 characters, but can’t get it to work.  The proc runs fine, it just doesn’t truncate.  Do you have time to take a look at it?

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