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Characters

The Characters tab allows you to define which characters are allowed to be present as a value of the message fields. Each option is described in the screenshot below:

Escaping Standard ASCII Characters

There are five options available under Standard ASCII characters in the Options window:

OptionDescription
Escape characters lower thanThe lowest character that will not be escaped.
default - escape control characters (0x00..0x1F)The recommended setting is to escape the control characters that are below 0x20.
disabled - standard characters are not escapedNot recommended. This setting leaves control characters unescaped.
escape all standard characters (0x00..0x7F)Not recommended. Normal ASCII characters will be escaped.
customNot recommended. An arbitrary value other than the above can be selected.

Remember that HL7 is an ASCII protocol and messages may consist of only visible ASCII characters. Some of these characters are allocated to be delimiters.

The scope of visible characters for ASCII is from ASCII 0x20 to the character "~". Therefore, the Chameleon engine allows you to configure a different scope of characters allowed to appear in the messages, although most users will probably never have to change this setting.

Escaping Extended ASCII Characters

If you want to use characters that are in the extended character range (128-255) such as ã or é, you must raise the highest non-escaped character to 0xFF to avoid HL7 standard escaping since ã and é are higher than ~.

There are four options available under Extended ASCII characters in the Options window:

OptionDescription
Escape characters higher thanThe highest character that will not be escaped.
disabled - extended characters are not escaped Allows all extended characters (e.g. UTF-8 or another character set) to appear in the message without escaping.
escape all extended characters (0x80..0xFF)All extended characters will be escaped as hex codes - \Xhh\.
customNot recommended. An arbitrary value can be selected.
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