The “Pre-Input Character Translation Table” in the Wedge allows you to translate ASCII characters to other characters before arriving in the Wedge. Typically, this feature is used to convert delimiter characters so that they will all be the same character when the Wedge receives the data. For example, suppose you had a device that transmitted the following data record:
123.53, 46.20, 03:45:21
In the above data record there are two different delimiter characters being used, the comma and the colon. If you translated the colons to commas in the “Pre-Input Character Translation Table”, then the data record would appear to the Wedge as:
123.53, 46.20, 03,45,21
Now that all the delimiters are the same, you could define the record structure in the Wedge as “Multiple Delimited Data Fields” using the comma as the delimiter with five fields in each record.
The “Pre-Input Character Translation Table” also allows you to translate characters to either “Ignore” or “Void Record”. The “Ignore” translation simply removes the character from the input data as if the character did not exist. The “Void Record” translation causes the Wedge to disregard the entire current data record if a character that has been translated to “Void Record” appears anywhere within the record. This feature can be used reject certain data records from a device. For example, suppose you had a device that transmitted the following data:
Device# Height Width Length
------------------------------------------
1 23 12 24
2 27 13 8
3 27 13 9
4 27 13 8
-------------------------------------------
Since you are probably not interested in the first line or the lines containing the dashes, you could use the “Void Record” translation to remove these lines by translating the dash character and the uppercase “D” to “Void Record”. After the translations, the Wedge would send the data as shown below:
1 23 12 24
2 27 13 8
3 27 13 9
4 27 13 8