Not properly processing lines in an HL7 document?

Question

I have a script that is supposed to check the first 4 characters of each line. It's not working. I'm processing HL7 documents that look like this:

MSH|...
EVN|...
PID|...
MSH|...
EVN|...
PID|...
MSH|...
EVN|...
PID|...

and here is my code:

Dim fso
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set file = fso.OpenTextFile (f.path, 1)
Do Until file.AtEndOfStream
    line = file.Readline
    wscript.echo left(line,4)
Loop

This outputs the following:

MSH|
MSH|
MSH|

Is there something I should use besides Readline ?

Answer 1

I ended up using emeditor 's replace in files feature to replace all instances of \\r with \\r\\n . This seems to fix the issue.

Answer 2

Revisited this for another task and found a better way. The following set of loops and conditions will break down a .dat file full of HL7 messages into Message, Segment, Field and Subfield. It does not account for repeating fields (~).

The first two FOR statments solve the original issue with line feeds vs carriage returns. It turns out there is a lf between each message and a cr between each segment.

Dim fso
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
file = fso.OpenTextFile(f.path).ReadAll
for each msg in split(file,vbLf)
    if msg <> "" then
        msgType = split(split(msg,"|")(8),"^")(1) 'results in something like A08
        for each line in split(msg,vbCr)
            if line <> "" then
                seg = left(line,3) 'MSH, PID, etc
                for each field in split(line,"|")
                    if instr(field,"^") > 0 then
                        for each subfield in split(field,"^")
                           'do code here for each subfield
                        next
                    end if
                next
            end if
        next
    end if
next