Treating Repeat and Separator Characters as Raw Text |
Normally, when Chameleon sees the ^, & and ~ characters in a field, it assumes that these characters are the subfield delimiter, sub-subfield delimiter and repeating field delimiter, respectively. However, some applications send these characters as part of their raw text data.
If your incoming data contains delimiter characters that you want to treat as raw text, you can use the following Python function to detect delimiter characters and convert them to raw text:
def raw_value(field):
repeat_delimiter = repeat_char(environment)
subfield_delimiter = separator_char(environment, 2)
subsubfield_delimiter = separator_char(environment, 3)
repeats = []
for repeat_index in range(field.count_of_repeat() or 1):
repeat = field.repeat_field(repeat_index)
subfields = []
for subfield_index in range(repeat.count_of_subfield() or 1):
subfield = repeat.subfield(subfield_index)
subsubfields = []
for subsubfield_index in range(subfield.count_of_subfield() or 1):
subsubfield = subfield.subfield(subsubfield_index)
subsubfields.append( subsubfield.value )
subfields.append( subsubfield_delimiter.join(subsubfields) )
repeats.append( subfield_delimiter.join(subfields) )
return repeat_delimiter.join(repeats)
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This function can be included as the Global Inbound Script for your VMD file. You can then create a Segment Inbound Script for the field containing the text that you want to convert. This script calls the function defined above:
value = raw_value(field) |
Note that this function works even if any delimiter character is set to something other than its standard value.
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| If your application data contains repeated copies of the & character in a number of fields, and it is not used as a sub-subfield delimiter anywhere, you can configure Chameleon to not recognize & as a delimiter. For more information, see Embedded Ampersand Characters. | ||
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