6.4 Communicating Delimiters
To communicate a primary Delimiter in a Cell, such a Cell shall not be enclosed in double quote characters. Instead the Delimiters shall be immediately preceded by an escaping code.
To escape a primary Delimiter, the escaping code is the backslash character (Unicode U+005C). Therefore the string A[TAB]B would have to be communicated as A\[TAB]B
(with [TAB]
representing the tabulator).
To escape a secondary Delimiter, the escaping code is a double backslash character (Unicode U+005C). Therefore the string A|B would have to be communicated as A\\|B
.
To communicate a backslash character, three backslash characters need to be communicated. Therefore the string A\B would have to be communicated as A\\\B
.
This “escaping mechanism” must be used for all special characters in all Cells, whether those Cells allow multiple values or not. A non-escaped pipe character in a single-value cell is, consequently, an error.
For the avoidance of doubt, escaping a character that should not be escaped, or not escaping a character that should have been escaped, will lead to an invalid Claim Detail Message or Claim Detail Discrepancy Notification.