Daffodil project is implementing various packed formats, and looking at the TLOG schema on the DFDL Schemas site.

The DFDL spec is clear that lengthKind delimited is allowed for packed formats (all variants of packed) and hexBinary.

My question is whether there is any restriction on the generality of this that was intended, but not stated in the spec, where we should be issuing a clarification.

E.g.,

  1. Can binary data have all of initiators, terminators, and separators?
  2. Is there a restriction on the charset encoding used to specify these, e.g., SBCS? Or do the byte patterns being used to scan for these require conversion of the specified delimiter to bytes from any supported encoding?
  3. Do escape schemes apply to delimited binary?
If, in fact, all these things are allowed, then I believe we should add a one-liner to section 12.3.2.2 specifying that all aspects of delimited parsing including the above, are specifically allowed.