FIX message delimiter

Question

I am relatively new to FIX-Protocol.

The delimiter for a FIX-Protocol message sometimes show ^ and other times |. Wikipedia for FIX-Protocol says [SOH]

Answer 1

The delimiter SOH = ASCII code 01 is a non-printable character. Looking at the binary representation of the message (e.g. in a hex editor view), you'll see the character as 0x01. To display the messages, it seems that some people use | and other use ^ which are rarely used characters and thus a good delimiter.