The FIX protocols (financial interchange) make use of stop bit encoding. I have heard of other places using this also. This is modern, current, non-legacy usage. This is the length encoding where the most-significant bit of a byte is used to determine whether there are more ASCII characters or not. The last byte will have the most-significant bit of 1, prior bytes most-significant bit of 0. Minimum length in this length kind is 1. It seems we are missing this lengthKind, which applies only to text in the ASCII/US-ASCII encoding. Mike Beckerle | OGF DFDL Workgroup Co-Chair | Tresys Technology | www.tresys.com Please note: Contributions to the DFDL Workgroup's email discussions are subject to the OGF Intellectual Property Policy <http://www.ogf.org/About/abt_policies.php>