EDIFACT

Introduction

For the electronic transmission of data, EDIFACT lays down guidelines referring to the definition of data items, data segments and data messages in the following documents:

  • UNTDED (United Nations Trade Data Elements Directory)

  • UN/EDIFACT Syntax Implementation Guidelines

  • UN/EDIFACT Message Design Guidelines

These guidelines have been used wherever appropriate. It is assumed that a message equates to a file, and that a segment equates to a record.

Separators

Every record has an EDIFACT data element separator (+) immediately after the record identifier.

The UNB, UNH and UNZ segments have, in addition, a data element separator between each attribute and, where an attribute is composed of two data elements, a different separator (:) is used between them. For example, a colon will appear between the syntax identifier and the syntax version number in the syntax identifier group of the UNB segment.

Each record represents an EDIFACT segment and is terminated by an apostrophe (‘) and a linefeed character (decimal 010).

Tags

Where a four-digit numeric TAG (as defined under UNTDED) is shown, this has been used to aid comprehension of the data. Where no TAG appears, there is no UNTDED definition of the element. These codes will not exist in the TARIC 3 database. The intention is to hold them in the TARIC 3 Data Dictionary System, which will be used for the maintenance of the TARIC 3 Interface Data Specification.

Character set

The TARIC3 IDS uses the multi-byte Unicode character set in order to allow the support of the descriptions in the languages of the candidate Member States.

Physically, each character is mapped onto one or more bytes according to the encoding chosen. A number of encodings exist for Unicode. The TARIC3 IDS uses the variable-length encoding UTF-8. The “Unicode transformation format” (UTF) encoding is an algorithmic mapping from every Unicode scalar value to a unique byte sequence. Detailed information can be found on http://www.unicode.org.