[HAPI-devel] UTF-8 support, how to define and test?

[Tom W. <tw...@su...>]

Hi.

I’m in the final testing phase of a HAPI-based application, and I want to define precisely what character encoding it can support. I know the HL7v2 spec defines UTF-8 as the supported character set. However, it looks like it is only supporting a subset of UTF-8. I am testing by ingesting an HL7v2 message in a unit test and serializing to XML. For example, it looks like Simplified Chinese, Vietnamese, Cyrillic, are not supported.

Sending this in an NTE segment:
我能吞下玻璃而不伤身体

Produces this on the other end:
???????????

So, exactly what UTF-8 characters can I expect to work? I also want to create a unit test with a full range of the supported characters.

It might be nice to support other languages, but I don’t know if I can expect to receive them from EMR systems.

Thanks in advance,

-tom