Yes, I believe Jonathan actually exploited that feature in a system he worked on, though for the life of me I can't remember how he used it or exactly what the system did beyond the usual EDI processing.
----------------------------------------- Michael C. Rawlins, Senior Software Engineer, GXS Sent from personal account On 6/26/2011 9:47 PM, Howard Parks wrote: > > Negative control numbers -- it is certainly not prohibited by the > field type > definition of that element. Has anyone actually seen a case of a negative > control number? Can anyone come up with a plausible use case? I would > never > fault any programmer for taking advantage of this simple assumption of > the > location of the segment terminator. > > Howard > 1 Peter 4:10 > > ________________________________ > From: Mike Rawlins <[email protected] > <mailto:mcr2%40rawlinsecconsulting.com>> > To: "[email protected] <mailto:EDI-L%40yahoogroups.com>" > <[email protected] <mailto:EDI-L%40yahoogroups.com>> > Sent: Sun, June 26, 2011 9:20:53 PM > Subject: Re: [EDI-L] <OFF-TOPIC> A gift for the group > > In regard to: > > "The ISA segment is always 105 characters in length - fixed length, so > you can get the EOS character by checking the 106th character in the EDI > text string. " > > I am thrilled at the pleasure of being the first to point out *this > time* that this is not true. As long time denizens of this list will > remember, Jonathan Allen many years ago brought to our attention that > the ISA might be 106 bytes with the segment terminator in the 107th > byte, this due to the fact that the control number can be negative. True > also that this almost never happens, but if you want a bullet proof > completely compiant parser you'll need to accomodate this idiosyncracy. > > Mike > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > ------------------------------------ ... 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/
