This takes me back 20+ years to when I had to create/parse EDI messages for various retailers when I worked at an independent record distributor.

I wrote a C library to parse the messages with callbacks in the style of Expat. There's binding for Perl to make it a bit easier to use. EDIFACT, X12 and Tradacoms are supported.

Anyways, unlikely anyone might need it these days, but there are some Perl scripts which can interpret the EDIFACT "directories" (basically message schemas), so you don't have to build your own message syntax definitions. It should be possible to convert the XML output that it generates into the Python needed to define message syntax, element definitions, etc.

Best of luck with it - there's a whole world of crazy industry standards to explore.

Oh, and consulting is a possibility if anyone needs it ;-)

-- https://github.com/davidcoles/medici