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Dealing with Lab Reports

There are a few different ways that lab reports can choose to structure textual data. One good technique to make it easier to deal with these different ways is to make use of Python scripting to concatenate the fragments together into a single column of a table.

One typical pattern that is commonly implemented is to represent a report with one OBX or NTE segment for each line of the report.

The other family of formats is to put the entire report in one field of an OBX segment, then use one of the following delimiters to separate the lines:

In each case it is very easy to write some Python code that will concatenate the strings together and output a single chunk. If you read the Python scripting chapter of this manual, examples are given of each type of transformation, including where each line of a lab result is in its own OBX segment.

Segment Identities

Another good technique for dealing with lab reports is to make use of Chameleon's Segment Identity feature. This allows you to define several OBX segments that match different types of OBX segments based on the value type field. For more information, see Segment Identities.