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Message Sets: Using mnemonics for special characters
A mnemonic is a tag that is delimited by < and >. The broker translates the mnemonic to obtain the actual value of the special character.
Mnemonics can be used in TDS properties Decimal Point, Escape Character, Reserved Characters, Delimiter, Group Indicator, Tag data Separator, Tag, and Repeating Element Delimiter to specify special characters.
There are two types of mnemonic:
- Control code mnemonics, which map to the common non-printing characters.
These are mapped using the local code page for your system. This is typically an ASCII code page on distributed platforms and an EBCDIC code page on other platforms.
This means that characters are generally mapped to the 'expected' values for your system. This depends on your code page setting; for more information, refer to your system documentation. If a specific mnemonic is not mapped to the value that you need, you can use the explicit representation (<U+xxxx>, <0xNN>, or <0XNN>) that is described later in this section.
- Message mnemonics for use with specific industry message standards
such as X12.
These are mapped according to their associated message standard. Each mnemonic has a default mapping, but in message standards such as EDIFACT and X12, this default can be overridden by a 'service string' that is specified in the message itself.
Mnemonics can be specified in one of the following ways:
- <Mnemonic_Name>, where Mnemonic_Name can comprise alphanumeric characters and underscore (_) characters.
- <U+xxxx>, where xxxx are hexadecimal digits. The mnemonic is interpreted as the Unicode character that corresponds to the value of the digits.
- <0xNN> or <0XNN>, where N is a hexadecimal digit. The mnemonic is interpreted as the raw byte value given by the digits.
For more details about the supported mnemonics, see Message Sets: TDS Mnemonics.