FIX Message and the SOH delimeter.

FIX Messages look like this: 8=FIX.4.4|9=122|35=8|49=A|56=B|...|10=14|
Tag-value pairings separated from each other by a delimeter character: the ASCII "SOH" 0x01 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII ).

Since the SOH is not an ASCII printable character it's not uncommon to see it replaced in documents and logs with other characters, such as | (pipe), # (hash), or short strings such as   < soh >
And here comes the interesting thing: if the log of your fix application prints the raw fix messages how is Fix Log Analyzer going to display that ?
The answer depends on the browser you are using.
Internet Explorer (both version 7 and version 8) shows a little rectangle.

Firefox shows a little square with 0001 inside. (nice)

Chrome does not show anything (not even an empty space)

Bottom line: Chrome's rendering of FIX messages is the least desirable for FIX web tools. I hope they will fix this soon in later versions.

Thanks for reading this.
M. Renz