Thanks, and my condolences for having to work in MS -Access. If you are familiar with the 850 format, the 855 should be pretty straight forward.

But the question as I understand is can a document use a different delimiter set in some segments? The answer to this question is a resounding no. The only delimiter characters allowed in the EDI file (ISA to IEA) are defined at the end of the ISA segment . (Characters 104, 105, and 106 of the ISA)

Also, the (`) character is not a hyphen. I have always called it a “back tick” but there may be another name for it.

It does sound like a cut and past error. Or we could call it laziness. In either case, when you actually work with the real data it needs to comply with the delimiters in the ISA.

Thanks for the question. Please let me know if you run into any other odd information.

Roy

I’m working on overhauling an MS-Access database I built over a year ago that has been generating the 856 ship notice for uploading to our trading partner. A new customer wants us to reply to their 850 purchase orders with 855 PO Acknowledgements, so it’s back to the drawing board. I’m still waiting on our interchange to get straightened out so I can look at an actual file, but their documentation examples use different delimiters, and in some cases, different delimiters in the same document.

For example, their 850 uses the * (asterisk) in the ST, BEG, REF, PER, TD5, PO1, CTT, and SE lines, but uses a ` (backwards hyphen?) in the N1, N3, N4, SCH, and MSG segments.

That’s impossible, right? Please confirm for me that this is probably a cut-and-paste error from someone responsible for writing a manual, not writing code, and has no idea what they’re writing.

Thanks,
Cevin

Some EDI software has a default recommended delimiter set that it preferes to use. In that case I would include those in my specification.

If your EDI application does not care or have a prefferenece, I recommend using the ^|~ combination, or ^ for the element delimieter, | for the sub-element, and ~ for the segment delimiter.

You can find an example and more discussion on this at my EDI Enveloping post about the ISA.

Let me know if there are more questions, please let me know.

Roy

Where can I find those recommended delimeters you refer to?

Included with my EDI Usage Specification are a set of recommended delimiters. I set my transformer to use them as default, and encourage my trading partners to do the same.

I searched the site without success…

Thanks,

CAL