Special Character '£' not being recognised in Healthshare

Question

Martin Browne · Mar 14, 2023

Hi,

We're having an issue with an inbound message to a Healthshare Business Service where the '£' sign is not being recognised and is being passed onto our downstream systems as '?'.

NTE|1|ODRCMNT|test!���comments  �  for  pou$nd si�n

We are using the 'latin1' selection for the Encoding.

Does anyone know the correct Char Encoding to use to remedy this issue?

Regards,

Martin

Product version: Ensemble 2017.1

Discussion (2)1

Robert Cemper · Mar 14, 2023

it's $zhex("A3") or $c(163) according to this source

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Julian Matthews · Mar 14, 2023

There's a few "gotchas" when it comes to Character Encoding. But the key thing in you case is understanding the character encoding being used by the receiving system. This should be something specified in the specification of the receiving system, but many times it's not.

If I had to guess, it's most likely that the receiving system is using UTF-8 simply because latin1/ISO-8859-1 encodes the pound symbol as hex "A3" whereas UTF-8 encodes to "C2 A3". As there's no solitary "A3" in UTF-8, there's nothing to print, which is why you get the ? instead. I'm sure there's other character sets where this can happen, but I would start there.

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