The application built in this tutorial currently processes HL7 messages as is. However, there are circumstances in which you might want to modify the HL7 message data before you extract it and load it into your data tables. You might want to modify HL7 message data if you want to:

• Combine multiple HL7 fields into a single table value;
• Alter the way some data is formatted;
• Provide a default value for an empty field.

Chameleon allows you to write scripts to modify the message data while it is being processed. These scripts are written in Python, a popular programming language that is in use all over the world.

	For more information on Python, see Using Python Scripting.

For an example of how Python scripts can be used: in the test message file, you may have noticed that the names extracted from the messages are in all capitals. For instance, the output from one message is:

PatientRegister message parsed with data:
Patient:
PatientId:583220
FirstName:SANCHO
Surname:PANZA
DateOfBirth:6/1/1605 12:15:20 PM
SocialSecurityNumber:981276345

Suppose that you mant to modify your application to only capitalize the first letter of any name. You can easily use Python scripts to alter these names.