About the CII Message

CII headers and trailers are in text, but messages are binary. To read a raw CII message outside of this product, you need a hex editor. Using a hex editor, you can see the basic structure of a CII message, which consists of:

• Control tags
• Transfer form data (TFDs)
• Length indicators
• Data bytes

A typical TFD consists of a tag, a length indicator, and data. The length of the element is always indicated, so delimiters are unnecessary.

The Translation service handles hexadecimal data in the range of 0x01 through 0xFF. The Translation service does not handle 0x00, and thus it cannot translate pure binary data such as bitmaps.