[erlang-questions] List Question

Richard A. O'Keefe ok@REDACTED
Wed Aug 9 02:02:37 CEST 2017



On 9/08/17 11:40 AM, Andrew McIntyre wrote:
> I am involved in standards process and there is a blog post here for
> anyone interested:
>
> https://kb.medical-objects.com.au/display/PUB/HL7v2+parsing

Ah.  It turns out that I had misunderstood the function of the
escape character.  I thought you would represent "~" as "\~"
but in fact it's
   \F\	|
   \R\	~
   \S\   ^
   \T\   &
   \E\   \
   \.br\ CR  -- isn't uniformity wonderful?
plus a bunch of other "free text formatting commands"
written as escape sequences (which may explain \.br\)
but not described in that page.
There is also encoding of non-ASCII characters using
HTML escapes (exact set not specified in that page).

So there are several rounds of processing:
  - build tree using delimiters and ignoring escapes
  - maybe process escapes
  - maybe process HTML &#...; escapes
  - maybe do something with formatting commands.
and dealing with data types comes somewhere between
the third and fourth rounds.

How hard is it to get hold of the actual standard?
(I can get Z39.50 for free...)



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