XLATE TCL Question

[Jon Melin]

Hi. I have a question regarding some TCL code used in my XLATE. I am trying to grab the first letter of a field coming in to filter by that letter. In this case the first letter is always ‘H’ – If it has an H I want to keep it, if it doesn’t I want to get rid of it. I already have everything setup in the IF statement to take care of this except I am having a hard time grabbing the H off the front to verify it is an H.

What I am doing:

1(0).0(0).0(0).PID(0).#3(0).[0]

Topic

[Robert Kersemakers]

Hi Jon,

You are having problems with xlateInVals and xlateOutVals. xlateInVals is a list of values coming into the tcl-portion; xlateOutVals is a list of values leaving the tcl.

So you would need something like this:

Code:

# Assign xlateInVals to variable
lassign $xlateInVals pid3
# Search for the first ‘H’ in the string
set first_h [string first “H” $pid3]
# Return this value, as a list!!
set xlateOutVals [list $first-h]

This should return -1 if there is no ‘H’ in PID-3; 0 if ‘H’ is the first character or a value > 0 to indicate where the first ‘H’ is found in PID-3.

Not sure though what you want to do with the outcome of this tcl-portion; to what field or variable is this going?

Do you want to keep the complete message only if PID-3 starts with an H? I wouldn’t do this in the Xlate, better to do it with a Pre-Xlate tcl-script.

Zuyderland Medisch Centrum; Heerlen/Sittard; The Netherlands

[Jim Kosloskey]

Jon,

The string first will find the first occurrence of the H in the string which is not necessarily the first actual byte of the string being interrogated.

You might want to combine the string first with a string index command to asure you are only checking the first character.

Something like this:

string first “H” [string index [lindex $xlateInVals 0] 0]

I have not actually tested the above code so it might need some tweaking.

You could also do that in 3 lines of code if that makes maintenance and/or troub leshooting easier for you.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 30+ years Cloverleaf, 60 years IT – old fart.

[Author]

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