HL7lib 0.2

Health level 7 is a protocol that is used to allow medical computers from different vendors to communicate with each other.

HL7lib library is an attempt to produce a simple, correct HL7 library that can be embeded in projects to enable rapid development of powerful tools and robust interfaces. I intend to provide the same interface in C, Perl and Tcl. If someone else cares to implement the same library in another language (python perhaps) I will add a contrib section to this package and happily include it as well.

This implementation makes no attempt to implement grammar rules. I am a big believer in building a simple system that works and adding to it. I plan on keeping this version of the library stable and coming out with a seperate full featured 2.3x version as well as a seperate 3.x version. Those two versions will most likely be C/C++ only versions.

Requirements:

· This library is self contained and attempts to be portable. You should need no other libraries or special installation methods.

Compilation and installation

In order to compile and install HL7_lib on your system, type the following in the base directory of the HL7_lib distribution:

% ./configure
% make
% make install

Since HL7_lib uses
autoconf

you should have not trouble compiling it.

Usage:

This is a very simple library that attempts to perform the following functions:

str2hl7 - Given a string return a structure that represents the message.
hl7print - Given a message structure, print out that structure to standard out.
hl7get - Given a message structure and a location in that message, return a string that best represents that location.
hl7put - Given a message structure, a location, and a string, set the location to the value of the string.
hl7free - cleanly removes a message structure from memory.
hl72str - given a message structure, return the string that best represents that location.

Product's homepage