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Delimiter Escape Sequences

Some user data may contain these special delimiter characters. For this reason, HL7 has a system for escaping them. The system is a little bit unusual in that unlike a language like C, each character has a unique escape sequence.

The following table shows the escape sequences for each of the different characters:

CharacterEscape Sequence
&\T\
^\S\
|\F\
~\R\
\\E\
Unprintable Hex Characters\Xxx..\

You will notice that even the escape character itself has an escape sequence.

Special Escape Sequences

There are some special escape sequences that are validated and passed through without escaping or unescaping:

Sequence/TypeFormat
Highlighting Sequences
  • \H\
  • \N\
Formatting Sequences (starting with a period)
  • \.br\
  • \.fi\
  • \.nf\
  • \.sp\
  • \.in\
  • \.ti\
  • \.sk\
  • \.ce\
Character Set Codes
  • \Cxxyy\ (single-byte)
  • \Mxxyy\, \Mxxyyzz\ (multi-byte)
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