Hello DFDL community,

Is there a list of formatting features used by the world's data formats? I 
imagine a list that is independent of how to parse the features, independent of 
syntax. It would be just a raw list of features.

I imagine something such as the following (incomplete) list.

------------------------------------------------------
List of Features used to Format Data
------------------------------------------------------
- separators
- position of separator
- initiators
- terminators
- length-of-data indicator
- units for the length-of-data indicator
- end-of-file indicator
- empty fields
- optional fields
- mandatory fields
- repeating fields
- when-to-stop-repeating indicator
- sequence
- choice
- default values
- fixed value
- no-data-available indicator
- datatypes
- text encoding
- byte order
- bit order
- newline indicator
- data follows a pattern
- whitespace
- escaping characters
- escaping blocks of data
- nested data
- recursive data
- boolean data representation
- various ways to represent unsigned integers

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