Special character appearing in downstream system but not seen in HL7 message.

Question

Question

#Business Operation #HL7 #InterSystems IRIS for Health #HealthShare

Hi,

We're having an issue with some messages being sent to a downstream system from Healthshare. Part of the free text in the NTE segment is displaying with special characters on the system front-end but is not present in the HL7 message that we send to them. We are guessing that this is a result of some of the text being copied and pasted from something like MS Word. The '?' on their system is just representing an invalid character.

Is anyone aware of a way to prevent this occurring? We are sending the messages using the 'cp1252' encoding.

Sent from us to system

What displays on the system front end

Thanks,

Martin

Product version: IRIS 2022.1

$ZV: IRIS for UNIX (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 for x86-64) 2022.1 (Build 209U) Tue May 31 2022 12:13:58 EDT [HealthConnect:3.5.0] [HealthConnect:3.5.0]

Discussion (2)1

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Eduard Lebedyuk · Apr 24

It's probably not a whitespace, but some other character, use zzdump to check out which character you're getting, after that you can use $translate or $zstrip to remove/replace this character.

2 0

score 1 · Answer 1 · 2025-04-25T11:42:49-04:00

Here's a sample zzdump custom function for DTL:

Class Utils.Functions Extends Ens.Util.FunctionSet
{

/// w ##class(Utils.Functions).ZZDUMP("abc")
ClassMethod ZZDUMP(var) As %String
{
	set id = $random(100000000000000000)
	while $d(^ISC.AsyncQueue(id)) {
		set id = $random(100000000000000000)
	}
	set str = ""
	
	try {	
		$$$TOE(sc, ##class(%Api.Atelier.v1).MonitorBeginCapture(id))
		if '$data(var) {
			write "<UNDEFINED>"
		} else {
			if '$isobject(var) {
				zzdump var
			} else {
				if var.%IsA(##class(%DynamicAbstractObject).%ClassName(1)) {
					zzdump var.%ToJSON()
				} elseif var.%IsA(##class(%Stream.Object).%ClassName(1)) {
					do var.Rewind()
					zzdump var.Read()
				} elseif var.%IsA(##class(EnsLib.HL7.Message).%ClassName(1)) {
					zzdump var.OutputToString()
				} else {
					// zzdump will output OREF string.
					zw var 
				}
			}
		}
		$$$TOE(sc, ##class(%Api.Atelier.v1).MonitorEndCapture(id))
	
		for i=1:1:^ISC.AsyncQueue(id,"cout","i") {
			set str = str _ ^ISC.AsyncQueue(id,"cout",i) _ $$$NL
		}
	} catch ex {
		do ##class(%Api.Atelier.v1).MonitorEndCapture(id)
	}
	kill ^ISC.AsyncQueue(id)
	quit str
}

}