HL7v2.RawMessage (HL7v2 v3.10.1)

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Represents a parsed HL7v2 message in raw form.

The raw message preserves the structure and content of the original message — no type coercion, no validation, no data loss. Round-tripping is canonical: line endings are normalized to CR and a trailing CR is always present, so parse(text) |> encode() produces the canonical wire form, which may differ from the input only in line-ending normalization.

Structure

Each segment is a tuple {name, fields} where:

  • name is a binary segment identifier (e.g., "MSH", "PID")
  • fields is an ordered list of field values, starting from the first field after the segment name

Field Value Representation

Field values use nested lists to represent the HL7v2 delimiter hierarchy:

  • Simple field: a binary string — "Smith"
  • Components: a list of binaries — ["Smith", "John", "", "Dr"]
  • Repetitions: a list of component-lists — [["12345", "", "", "MRN"], ["67890", "", "", "SSN"]]
  • Sub-components: lists nested within components as needed

For MSH, field 1 is always the field separator character as a single-byte binary (e.g., "|"), and field 2 is the encoding characters as a literal string (e.g., "^~\\&").

Summary

Types

field_value()
t()

Types

field_value()

@type field_value() :: binary() | [binary()] | [[binary()]] | [[[binary()]]]

t()

@type t() :: %HL7v2.RawMessage{
  segments: [{binary(), [field_value()]}],
  separators: HL7v2.Separator.t(),
  type: {binary(), binary()} | {binary(), binary(), binary()}
}