Skip to main content

Separators

Separators

A string of separator characters which InterSystems IRIS assigns to X12 separators in left to right order as described below.

An X12 document uses special characters to organize its raw contents. These characters may vary from one clinical application to another. For non-empty values of Separators, positions 1 through 3 (left to right) are interpreted as follows:

  1. Data Element Separator (ES)

  2. Component Separator (CS)

  3. Data Element Repeat Separator (RS)

The default values for positions 1 through 3 are:

  1. * (asterisk)

  2. : (colon)

  3. ^ (caret) for SOAP-based operations and \a (record separator) for all other operations

For Separators, you must supply a string of three characters which InterSystems IRIS assigns to X12 separators in left to right order: ES, CS, RS, as described in the previous list.

Any characters in positions 4 through 6 override the default segment terminator character, which is ~ (tilde). You may specify from 0 to 3 characters in positions 4 through 6 using the following:

  • \r for the carriage return (ASCII 13)

  • \n for the line feed (ASCII 10)

  • \a for the array record separator (ASCII 30)

You can use \x in positions 1 through 3 if you need to specify segment terminators in positions 4 and higher but want your output documents to use fewer than 3 separators. Separators designated by \x in positions 1 through 3 are not used. The purpose of \x is simply to extend the length of the list of separators so that position 4 is interpreted correctly as the first segment terminator.

If the Separators string is empty, the default is to use the current default separators and segment terminators for X12, plus a carriage return (ASCII 13) and line feed (ASCII 10), for example:

*:\a~\r\n
FeedbackOpens in a new tab