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I understand that edifact syntax for the segment terminator is character " ' ". I have a situation where I receive an edifact file with no segment terminators

example instead of IFT+3+XYZCOMPANY AVAILABILITY' my segments ends like IFT+3+XYZCOMPANY AVAILABILITY without the terminator.

I would highly appreciate anyone who could explain to me the theory behind this.

felix
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1 Answers1

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A segment terminator is always required. If there truly is no segment terminator, the EDI document is not valid by the EDIFACT standard.

It may be that they are actually using a CR/LF as the segment terminator. Although not good practice or valid EDIFACT, if you can set your software to accept a CR/LF as a segment terminator it should solve your issue.

To add to this, a segment terminator can be defined in the UNA segment eg. UNA:+.? ' where the 6th character will be the segment terminator. This is not required for a valid EDIFACT document.

Tom Bryant
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  • It is also not unusual in circumstances like this to look at the document via a Hex Editor. – Andrew Oct 03 '17 at 11:57
  • Thanks for the reply Andrew, I am using Smooks framework to process edifact data. In this scenario smooks doesn't validate the edifact format with the segment terminator. – felix Oct 03 '17 at 21:41
  • Thank Tom, Actually you are correct when I add the UNA:+.? ' segment at the top Smooks validate the edifact correctly. – felix Oct 03 '17 at 21:54
  • You should be able to override the delimiters with `` – Stavr00 Oct 20 '17 at 13:07