EDI is all about delimiters. By describing in the first 106 bytes of any EDI file which delimiters are used in the rest of the document the EDI file is machine readable. There are 4 delimiters used in HIPAA EDI.
The element separator is the 4th byte of any EDI file. It separates the elements of the segments. All HIPAAsuite products default to * for the element separator.
The sub-element separator is defined in byte 105 and serves to divide elements further. HIPAAsuite default is the colon ':'
The Repetition separator is used since the 5010 version of EDI and indicated in ISA_11. Our default is the caret '^'
The segment separator is byte 106 and used to separate the individual segments of an EDI file. Our default is the tilde '~'.
HIPAAsuite products allow you to set the separators freely to any value that is allowed by the X12 committee. You use the following screen
The delimiter screen