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It's been a while since I looked of the ISO spec (which I still can't believe I had to buy to read) -- but you can certainly infer by looking at legal characters laid out by LC. In reality -- only a handful of unprintable characters are technically allowed in a MARC record -- but you have to remember that when MARC was created -- it was for block reading -- and generally, early (and current) readers stop on hard breaks. --TR > -----Original Message----- > From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of > Jonathan Rochkind > Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2011 11:49 AM > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] is this valid marc ? > > 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.