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in reply to Edifact anyone?

EDI Translators are expensive, but worth it if you have more than just a very few trading partners. I would suggest that approach before writing your own.

Secondly, if I was going to expend the effort to write my own translator, I would be run, not walk, away from any module that generated warnings saying something in it is 'experimental'. Is it something that is going to change functionality or just go away in a future release? Is all my hard work going to be wasted?

Is your test data well formed? I work with X12, not EDIFACT, so I can't tell just by looking. That might be the source of the error. If not, I think you need to open up the module and go to the line indicated and see what it was trying to do.

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Re^2: Edifact anyone? (use feature 'switch'
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 16, 2013 at 22:47 UTC

    I would be run, not walk, away from any module that generated warnings saying something in it is 'experimental'. Is it something that is going to change functionality or just go away in a future release? Is all my hard work going to be wasted?

    Reason before panic friend :)

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Re^2: Edifact anyone?
by Skeeve (Parson) on Dec 17, 2013 at 08:23 UTC

    I have no real trading partner. I just need to extract some information for reports.

    The other stuff about X12 - sorry - I don't really understand that yet. Just started learning yesterday.

    s$$([},&%#}/&/]+}%&{})*;#$&&s&&$^X.($'^"%]=\&(|?*{%
    +.+=%;.#_}\&"^"-+%*).}%:##%}={~=~:.")&e&&s""`$''`"e
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      Hi Skeeve.

      Until you mentioned it, I had never heard of EDIFact.

      I am not sure why something that is supposed to be an ANSI ISO standard doesn't have a free API. It sounds like it is the equivalent to charging for the IP protocol. Maybe I am wrong here. Maybe the charges are for variations that orginzations add to EDI.

      I did some poking around and it looks like there are many translators for sale on the net.

      See references on this page for 'TrueCommerce' and 'B2B Gateway' http://www.sleeter.com/blog/2012/04/quickbooks-edi/

      I also came across some viewers. I am not sure if they will help you or not. Hopefully they will.

      As with the library you found, as it was mentioned earlier, I would shy away from something that was potentially cobbled together. Espcially when working with production data.

      Copy and paste EDI code into the page. This one does translate the code you posted, but I am not sure if it is useful. http://www.edifactviewer.com/

      EDIFACT Viewer http://sourceforge.net/projects/edifactviewer/
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      I only mention X12 to say that I know EDI. It's what I do at my job, all day, every day.

      You have no trading partner? Okay, but somebody you know does! Nobody messes around with EDIFACT unless they have to. So, you aren't writing a translator, just trying to understand the structure, and maybe learn some new perl skills along with it. I understand that. For my own work, I have not explored any of the EDI perl modules. We use a translator. I do have half a dozen awk scripts I use to make quick reports from EDI and application data files.

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In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom