Code Clinic - The Build - Book 6: Building an HL7 Pipeline

Here the separate pieces become one program. The book lays out a pipeline in four stages, read then parse then validate then output, and builds it in front of you. You start with the HL7 v2 message format and the delimiter characters that carve it into segments and fields, because nothing further along works until you can read that structure. Then you read a file, split it into segments, and write the parsing for MSH and PID so a message gives up its sending system, its type, and the patient identity it carries. Validation follows: checking that the fields you require are present, and deciding what a record with a missing one should do. The second half scales all of it up. The os module finds every message file in a folder so the pipeline runs across the lot. try and except catch the bad file instead of letting it kill the run. Logging records what broke and where, so you can see which three messages failed out of four hundred and why.

Twenty A4 pages, in full colour. Written in short sentences and plain English, for readers whose first language is not English and clearer for everyone else because of it.

Every code example in this book was run before the page was printed, so the output you read is the output you get. Instant PDF download. By M.R. Sterling.