HL7 V2 manual extraction
Tools to extract stuff from the printed V2 manual . You need to save the Word document "as a Web Page". These tools assume that you have done that in a directory called "html", using the same names a the chapters themselves. The paths are hard coded into the Shell scripts. Change to suite yourself.
GetData.sh - the Shell script to extract thing from all the chapters other than 2A
cleanHL7.pl - the Perl script called by GetData.sh
GetDataTypes.sh - the Shell script to extract the data types from Chapter 2A
cleanDT25.pl - the Perl script called by GetDataTypes.sh (updated 17-Oct-2007)
O.K. - so cleanHL7.pl is not perfect. It's fine for everything except the tables. When it comes to the tables, it extracts everything, but it sometime classifies rubbish as good stuff, and sometimes it classifies good stuff as rubbish. However, after many, many hours of comparing v25.csv with the tables in MWB and Appendix A, and reading the complete manual from cover to cover, and pulling stuff out of the "rubbish" file (v25ETS.csv), it has been possible to create hl7v25tables.csv which appears to be a pretty complete compendium of all the tables from all of the chapters in V2.5. However no manual process is perfect, so please let the maintainer of this site know of any errors, omissions, or accidental inclusions that you find (updated 6-November-2007)
Now hl7v25tables.csv is primarily designed to help auto-generate the tables in the Word documents. Hence it's not ideal for validating the codes in messages. For instance, it contains codes like "SUGGESTION" and "10 ... 19", which you will find in the manual. So some human examination and fine tuning will be required before it can be adopted for automated processes in a conformance testing environment. Unfortunately hl7v25tables.csv is about 6.5K lines, and human examination of something that large is very time consuming. On the other side of the coin, most conformance testing will focus on information that will be found in the modified updated Version 2.5 V2.xml Schemas.
This Web Site is maintained by Russell McDonell - russell.mcdonell@c-cost.com