Delimiter Characters (Bytes)

There is essentially no limitation on what characters you can use as delimiters; however, you obviously want to avoid characters that can be confused with data or interfere with escape sequences, as described in Escape Option. The backslash (\) is normally used as an escape character; for example, the HL7 protocol uses a double backslash as part of an escape sequence that provides special text formatting instructions. Additionally, a colon ( :) is used as a literal in system-generated time strings. This can interfere with recovery procedures, for example following a Domain shutdown.

Escape Sequences

Use a backslash (\) to escape special characters. The following table lists the currently supported escape sequences.

*For octal values, the leading variable d can only be 0 - 3 (inclusive), while the other two can be 0 - 7 (inclusive). The maximum value is \377.

**For hexadecimal values, the variable d can be 0 - 9 (inclusive) and A - F (inclusive, either upper or lower case). The maximum value is \xFF.