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Separators

Separators

A string specifying characters to be used as separators for encoding outbound EDIFACT documents.

Separators accepts up to seven characters as input and defaults to :+?*'\r\n. Each character of input is interpreted from left to right as follows:

Position Separator Default value
1 Component Separator : (colon)
2 Data Element Separator + (plus sign)
3 Escape Separator ? (question mark)
4 Repetition Separator * (asterisk)
5 Segment Terminator ' (apostrophe)
6–7 appendix to Segment Terminator \r\n (new line)

If the Separators string is empty, the separator values supplied within each EDIFACT document will be used.

Any characters in positions 6 and 7 will be appended to the Segment Terminator. By default \r\n occupy these positions where \r (ASCII 13) represents a carriage return and \n (ASCII 10) represents a line feed. These characters resolve to a new line such that each segment is represented on its own line in output.

Note:

A question mark (?) also acts as an escape for characters reserved as separators. InterSystems IRIS will automatically escape any reserved characters in an EDIFACT message that were not previously separators. Conversely, InterSystems IRIS will un-escape any characters that were previously reserved but are no longer. For example, if ^ was the default Component Separator in a document and you set : to override it then any : characters will be escaped as ?:, any ^ separators will be converted to :, and any escaped ?^ characters will be converted to ^.

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