x12pp

x12pp is a CLI pretty-printer for X12 EDI files.

X12 is an arcane format consisting of a fixed-length header followed by a series of segments, each separated by a segment terminator character.

These segments are generally not separated by newlines, so extracting a range of lines from a file or taking a peek at the start using the usual Unix toolbox becomes unnecessarily painful.

Of course, you could split the lines using sed -e 's/~/~\n/g' and get on with your day, but:

1. although the ~ is the traditional and most widely-used segment terminator it's not required -- each X12 file specifies its own terminators as part of the header.
2. using sed or perl would mean I wouldn't have a chance to explore fast stream processing in Rust.

So here we are.

Installation

Homebrew

$ brew tap clarkema/nomad
$ brew install x12pp

With cargo

$ cargo install x12pp

From source

x12pp is written in Rust, so you'll need an up-to-date Rust installation in order to build it from source. The result is a statically-compiled binary at target/release/x12pp, which you can copy wherever you need.

$ git clone https://github.com/clarkema/x12pp
$ cd x12pp
$ cargo build --release
$ ./target/release/x12pp --version

Usage

$ x12pp < FILE > NEWFILE
$ x12pp FILE -o NEWFILE

# Strip newlines out instead with:
$ x12pp --uglify FILE

See manpage or --help for more.

Benchmarks

All tests were performed on an Intel Core i9-7940X, using a 1.3G X12 test file located on a RAM disk. In each case, shell redirection was used to pipe the file through the test command and into /dev/null in order to get as close as possible to measuring pure processing time. For example:

$ time sed -e 's/~/~\n/g' < test-file > /dev/null

Tool	Command	Terminator detection	Pre-wrapped?	SIGPIPE?	Time
x12pp	x12pp	✓	✓	✓	1.3s
GNU sed 4.7	sed -e 's/~/~\n/g'	✗	✗	✗	7.6s
perl 5.28.2	perl -pe 's/~[\r\n]*/~\n/g'	✗	✓ but slower	✗	8.5s
edicat	edicat	✓	✓	✓	7m41s

Notes

1. 'SIGPIPE' refers to whether a command can return a partial result without having to process the entire input. One of the motivations for x12pp was to be able to run x12pp < FILE | head -n 100 without having to plough through a multi-gigabyte file.
2. Of course you could write a Perl script that did correctly read the segment terminator before processing the rest of the file.
3. Perl produces the correct output with input data that is already wrapped, but much slower; around 24 seconds compared to 8.5.
4. See https://github.com/notpeter/edicat for edicat