I have been trying to rationalize the definitions in the DFDL spec for separated sequences.

I cannot find a way to express something very simple: A repeating element with minOccurs non-zero-length elements with separators required, and up to maxOccurs (or unbounded) non-zero-length elements with separators are allowed. This means separators can never be adjacent anywhere in the corresponding data stream (except if escaped, or hidden inside say a fixed-length string inside a complex type element). Adjacent delimiters would be a parse error.

I expected this to be occursCountKind 'implicit' with separatorSuppressionPolicy 'never', but that appears to mean that maxOccurs must be bounded and there are always exactly maxOccurs separators, the latter of which (maxOccurs - minOccurs of them) can be empty strings, meaning optional elements will not be created for them. 

All the other 3 separator suppression policies absorb adjacent separators, except for trailingEmptyStrict doesn't absorb them at the end of the group.

There doesn't seem to be a way to be strict about the format and speculatively parse only non-zero-length elements requiring each optional occurance to appear with associated separator. I.e., no trailing adjacent separators, and no adjacent separators in the middle or beginning either.

Are we missing separatorSuppressionPolicy='neverEmpty' or 'anyEmptyStrict' perhaps?

Comments?

...mikeb