How to view carriage return in HL7 message?

Question

Which tool do I use to find out carriage return in HL7 text file and how do I identify it?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Use Notepad++ and turn on "Show End of Line".

Answer 2

If I could expand a bit. The "Carriage Return" you are speaking of in the context of HL7 is the HL7 "Segment Delimiter". In the HL7 Standard the "Segment Delimiter" is an Ascii character 13 (Hex 0D) which is in fact a "Carriage Return".

But there's a very common trap which you can fall into here. This character CAN be changed and redefined if the "HL7 Trading Partners" (IE the people exchanging the HL7 messages) actually agree on it. It would be perfectly acceptable for instance if my trading partner and I agreed to use a $ sign as the "Segment Delimiter".

Also, working in support at a company whose business it is to work with HL7 I can tell you that one of the most common calls we get are from people who have used Notepad or really any text editor to "look at" an HL7 message and then saved it and thus corrupted it because their editor converted all of the "carriage returns" to "CRLFs".

Either use a Hex editor/viewer or (and this is much simpler) get a REAL HL7 Viewer / Editor like the UltraPort HL7 Notepad, or 7Edit etc. (the UltraPort Notepad is cheaper).

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Your HL7 engine may have the tools built in. In Mirth you can configure the display of the messages to show line ending. You can also define what the line endings should be in the channel definitions.

Outside of that, any modern text editor, like Notepad++ as @Mike Stonis stated or TextPad or even VIM if you're desperate.