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On 5/19/2011 2:33 PM, Reese, Terry wrote: > Jonathan, > > Karen is correct -- CR/LF are invalid characters within a MARC record. This has nothing to do if the character is valid in the set -- the format itself doesn't allow it. I'm curious where in the spec it says this -- of course, it's an intellectual exersize at this point, because even if the spec says one thing, it doesn't matter if everyone (including tool-writers) has always understood it differently. (This is a problem for me with lots of library 'standards' including MARC. "Oh yeah, it might APPEAR to say/allow/prohibit that, but don't believe it, 'everyone' has always understood it diffferently." Or two parts of a spec which contradict each other). In the glossary here: http://www.loc.gov/marc/specifications/speccharintro.html It does say "Consequently,/code points/less than 80 (hex) have the same meaning in both of the encodings used in MARC 21 and may be referred to as ASCII in either environment." Which could be interpreted to include control chars such as CR and LF. (Thanks Dan Scott). Of course, the glossary section may not actually be an operative part of the standard, or it may not mean what it seems to mean, or everyone may have always acted as if it meant something different. Welcome to MARC. But I'm not succesfully finding anything else that says one way or another on the legality. Most of the ascii control chars do seem to be missing from Marc8 (whether by design or accident), but that doesn't neccesarily mean they're illegal in a MARC record using some other (legal for MARC) encoding. But I believe Terry that it's not allowed (I believe Terry about just about everything). It's just really an intellectual exersize in the difficulty of finding answers in the MARC spec at the moment.