Card Acceptor Name / Location
What it is
Merchant name, city, and country in fixed subfields — the text that ends up on the cardholder statement.
Example values
ACME COFFEE 42 AMSTERDAM NLVisa layout: name (25), city (13), country (2) = 40 chars. Mastercard uses name (22), space, city (13), space, country (3).DE 43 on the wire
Bitmap position
DE 43 is bit 43 of the primary bitmap: byte 6, mask 0x20. A primary bitmap with only DE 43 present reads 0000000000200000 in hex.
Length
DE 43 is fixed length: always 40 characters, with no length prefix. A parser reads exactly that many and moves on, so shorter values are left-aligned and padded with trailing spaces.
Size in the message
At most 40 bytes when the message travels as text (ASCII or EBCDIC).
Format ans
Format ans means alphanumeric and special: letters, digits, space and punctuation.
Specification reference
Defined in ISO 8583:1987 (base). Card networks publish their own dialect tables (Visa BASE I / V.I.P., Mastercard CIS) that refine formats, lengths, and — for private-use elements — the entire layout. Always confirm against the interface specification you implement.