I'm not sure though. I found other materials on Biztalk indicating that theortically it is an LL(k) parser which can be set to "unbounded" lookahead, and that is not consistent with implied limitations that you found below. So who knows really? ...mikeb Mike Beckerle Architect, Scalable Computing IBM Software Group Information Integration Solutions Westborough, MA Steve Hanson <smh@uk.ibm.com> Sent by: owner-dfdl-wg@ggf.org 07/14/2005 08:29 AM To dfdl-wg@gridforum.org, owner-dfdl-wg@ggf.org cc Subject Re: [dfdl-wg] example of MS Biztalk dfdl-like annotations Interesting. The problem the author observes at the end is one we discussed at the F2F. It can be solved in DFDL using regular expressions, or by multiple parsing. It looks like BizTalk does not support this? If so it means there are a large class of data structures that it can not easily represent. Regards, Steve Steve Hanson WebSphere Business Integration Brokers, IBM Hursley, England Internet: smh@uk.ibm.com Phone (+44)/(0) 1962-815848 Mike Beckerle <beckerle@us.ibm. com> To Sent by: dfdl-wg@gridforum.org owner-dfdl-wg@ggf cc .org Subject [dfdl-wg] example of MS Biztalk 12/07/2005 19:47 dfdl-like annotations I found this link to the Microsoft biztalk style of annotations. Thought some of you might like to surf it. There's no news here. Just indicates a style. http://www.winterdom.com/dev/bts/BTSFFSchemaTut2.html