iNTERFACEWARE™ Inc.

Delimiter Redefinitions

If you are new to HL7, one thing that can be really confusing is the fact that delimiter characters can be redefined on the fly in the MSH segment of each message.

Each HL7 message starts with a MSH segment, much like the following:

MSH|^~\&|...^...|

It is at this point in the message that some HL7 implementations choose to use different delimiter characters. For example:

MSH$%#!($...%...$