The recent thread about problems with interchange recognition in eVision made me think about what one should do to recognise an ISA segment. As an EDI software coder this can be an acute problem when trying to extract EDI from the body of an email, particularly when the mailbox is not used exclusively for EDI traffic (it does happen), but there are other noisy transmission methods for which it is relevant.
You need to strike a balance between selection criteria which are too weak (if you just look for "ISA" there is a real risk of aliasing with general text), and too stringent (if you test the position and value of every delimiter then you may ignore a badly formed segment which should properly have been analysed and reported on by the EDI system). We require that the interchange start with "ISA" and that the fourth and seventh characters be the same. If this condition is satisfied then the parser is invoked to analyse the character stream as an X12 interchange. This has worked for us for over fifteen years, but we do not have to deal with much X12! I wondered what the thoughts of the list members were about this? Regards Chris -- Chris Johnson mobile:+44 (0)7785 302122 Fax: +44 (0)870 0519 818 EDI website http://www.edimatrix.co.uk EDIMatrix Ltd work: 0845 126 0680 or +44 20 8778 1402 Registered in UK no. 2777624 Reg.Office: 34 Sydenham Rd, London SE26 5QF ------------------------------------ ... Please use the following Message Identifiers as your subject prefix: <SALES>, <JOBS>, <LIST>, <TECH>, <MISC>, <EVENT>, <OFF-TOPIC> Job postings are welcome, but for job postings or requests for work: <JOBS> IS REQUIRED in the subject line as a prefix.Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
