I'm curious what's going on here, it doesn't make any sense.

Do you just mean that your MARC file has more than one 856 in it? That's 
what your pasted marc looks like, but that is definitely legal, AND I've 
parsed many many marc files with more than one 856 in them, with 
ruby-marc, it was not a problem.  I do it all the time.

Or do you mean your 856 had a newline ("\n") in it?  I don't know if 
I've ever tried that, although yes, it should be legal.  But if 
ruby-marc has a bug there, yes it needs to be fixed.

What form is your marc in that you are parsing with ruby-marc?  marc21 
binary? marcxml?  Or are you actually trying to parse what you pasted 
in, that weird marc-as-human-readable-text format?  I vaguely recall 
ruby-marc having a method to parse such marc-as-human-readable-text, but 
I'm not sure if it's actually a _standard_ at all, so I'm not sure if 
it's possible to say what should or shouldn't be legal in it.

Jonathan

On 5/19/2011 12:49 PM, James Lecard wrote:
> Thanks a lot Richard,
>
> So I guess my patch could be ported to the source code of ruby-marc,
>
> Let me know if interested,
>
> James
>
> 2011/5/19 Richard, Joel M<[log in to unmask]>
>
>> I'm no MARC expert, but I've learned enough to say that yes, this is valid
>> in that what you're seeing is the $q (Electronic format type) and $u
>> (Uniform Resource Identifier ) subfields of the 856 field.
>>
>> http://www.oclc.org/bibformats/en/8xx/856.shtm
>>
>> You'll see other things when you get multiple authors (creators) on an item
>> or multiple anythings that can occur more than once.
>>
>> --Joel
>>
>> Joel Richard
>> IT Specialist, Web Services Department
>> Smithsonian Institution Libraries | http://www.sil.si.edu/
>> (202) 633-1706 | [log in to unmask]
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On May 19, 2011, at 12:37 PM, James Lecard wrote:
>>
>>> I'm using ruby-marc ruby parser (v.0.4.2) to parse some marc files I get
>>> from a partner.
>>>
>>> The 856 field is splitted over 2 lines, causing the ruby library to
>> ignore
>>> it (I've patched it to overcome this issue) but I want to know if this
>> kind
>>> of marc is valid ?
>>>
>>> =LDR  00638nam  2200181uu 4500
>>> =001  cla-MldNA01
>>> =008  080101s2008\\\\\\\|||||||||||||||||fre||
>>> =040  \\$aMy Provider
>>> =041  0\$afre
>>> =245  10$aThis Subject
>>> =260  \\$aParis$bJ. Doe$c2008
>>> =490  \\$aSome topic
>>> =650  1\$aNarratif, Autre forme
>>> =655  \7$abook$2lcsh
>>> =752  \\$aA Place on earth
>>> =776  \\$dParis: John Doe and Cie, 1973
>>> =856  \2$qtext/html
>>> =856  \\$uhttp://www.this-link-will-not-be-retrieved-by-ruby-marc-library
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> James L.