When X12 is transmitted by SOAP(XML) envelope certain characters must be escaped to avoid XML syntax errors. Example ampersand (&) is escaped to &
When this escaping is done it sometimes causes a data element to exceed its length limitation. We get 271 responses with MSG01 elements that exceed 264 characters because of the escape sequences. For length purposes do these sequences count as a single character or do they count as 4 separate characters?
This is beyond the scope of the ASC X12 standard. When a filter is applied to an ASC X12 interchange prior to a transmission by the sender the receiver must apply a complementary filter to the sender's filter to the filtered interchange to restore its original state before the receiver performs EDI processing.
For example in this case, the ASC X12 payload has been escaped for XML processing and must be unescaped after retrieving from the XML element content.