I have a data format in front of me that has 64 7-bit ASCII characters, but the format has them bit-packed, i.e., 448 = 7 * 64 bits, so ....the character codes aren't octet/byte aligned. Furthermore, the 'string' either uses up the entire 64 character maximum length OR it has a terminating character which is a 0x7F character code. I believe I was the advocate for a position that character codes should always be 8-bit aligned. That would be because I had never seen anything like this. I am told there are also 6-bit ascii-variations, similarly packed together to save space. BTW: This occurs in a specific US MIL STD message header format, so it's not like it's some obscure unused corner case. Right now, the best I think I can do is to model this data not as a string at all, but as an array of integers, each one having 7-bit length, and not aligned (that is, aligned to 1-bit). Doing that I can use occursCountKind='parsed', and an assertion to deal with the optional termination by 0x7F value. To handle this as a string, we'd need to be able to specify that the character codes are not aligned, and the width of the bit-fields making up each character code. Or I suppose we could just say this is a special kind of character set encoding "ASCII-7-bit-packed" or something. Having that, I could deal with the termination via a choice of either the terminated flavor, or the fixed length flavor (which excludes the terminator) by way of a choice of two strings each having a lengthKind="pattern". Comments? -- Mike Beckerle | OGF DFDL WG Co-Chair Tel: 781-330-0412