Processing EDI Documents into XML with Python

any companies devote a sizeable portion of their IT infrastructure to converting traditional EDI data to and from the data formats their back office systems use. Typically, they handle this conversion using software packages purchased from EDI software vendors. But as more and more back-end systems become capable of consuming XML, it's becoming increasingly attractive to avoid all the proprietary formats and simply translate EDI X12 data to and from XML. This article shows you how to create your own tools for parsing, validating, and then translating EDI X12 data to XML. All the code examples for this article are in Python, but you could just as easily use any other programming language.

Introduction
EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is a generic term used to describe the exchange of electronic business documents between business partners. Specific incarnations of EDI such as ANSI X12, EDIFACT, Tradacom, and TDCC are character-delimited text files that follow a specific format. See the sidebar An EDI X12 Formatting Example for a brief explanation of the structure of X12.