This is a basic HL7 parser written in Go. There are no external dependencies,
only the standard library is used for runtime code (github.com/testify/assert
is used in tests to make them easier to reason about).
This parser accepts an io.Reader as the input, so anything that follows that
interface should be usable here, such as files and TCP streams. Note that this
does not currently support MLLP.
This library is tested to work on the following platforms:
- Go versions 1.16.x, 1.17.x, and 1.18.x
- Latest version of macOS (AMD64)
- Latest version of Windows (AMD64)
- Latest version of Ubuntu (AMD64)
It should probably work without issue in older versions of Go and operating systems since we are not utilizing any low-level features or anything particularly modern in Go.
Installation is simple:
$ go get github.com/mylanconnolly/hl7Usage is meant to mimic the semantics of a reader. Additionally, the HL7 data
is read from an io.Reader, so it's relatively trivial to read HL7 data from
a variety of sources (a file, TCP connection, bytes.Buffer, etc.). Actual
parsing of the message happens when you fetch a segment. This laziness should
help with large messages, particularly when you find out halfway through the
message that you don't care about it anymore (maybe it doesn't have anything
to do with your business case).
For example usage, see the example program. There is an example file with HL7 data in it gathered from Wikipedia and Ringholm bv.
Further usage information can be found here.
I would like to add the following functionality, but it's not on the immediate schedule:
- A way to handle unmarshalling using Go semantics (struct tags, etc.).
- Some validation of the input data (this isn't likely; it means this program will need to know a lot about HL7 and I might not have time to implement it correctly).
- MLLP