World: r3wp

3) is like 2)  you put a | to close of the second break. I noticed 
on rebol 2 strange reactions with find multi-case too

in rebol 2  for example if you do if  not find str any ["!" ";" ] 
that will work if you have str with "!" in it but not with ";" but 
if you invert the position of your find argument like this [";" "!"] 
then you detect when str have ";" in it but not when it have "!" 
in it

>> str: "tot!;"
== "tot!;"
>> if not find str any["!" ";"] [ print "found it!!"]
== none
>> str: "tot;"
== "tot;"
>> if not find str any["!" ";"] [ print "found it!!"]
found it!!

Shadwolf - but that is your bug ;-) Simply put, you try to mix parse-like 
behaviour with how 'any behaves. 'any and 'all are just functions, 
so in the case of 'any it returns any true condition match, so any 
["!" ";"] always returns "!", because it is evaluated as 'true.

... so the code above behaves correctly, because in the second case 
your string does not contain "!"

Pekr, try to run your 2) and 3) in trace mode, you'll see that there's 
no bug, parse rules evaluation looks consistent to me.

In 3), the second 'break| doesn't report error because it's never 
evaluated. The rule fails on the first input character when trying 
to match "y" and 'skip is never reached. In 2), 'skip helps consuming 
the input until the "y" character which leads to evaluate 'break| 
and raises the error.

yes, you might be right doc. But - it is really very difficult to 
track down for user. It almost looks like scanner bug, but it is 
not. What actually happens in the case 3) is, that "break|" is being 
considered a regular word, which just does not have value. Stating 
that, it also means that 'skip is not part of OR expression. So, 
'some block fails on not matching "y" ....

Here's a parse question for the experts.

If I have a document with headings eg. a: b: .. z: and text optionally 
under each heading ... would it be possible to use parse to collect 
all the text from each heading if the headings are in any order and 
some headings with no text are optionally missing?

Each heading can only occur once in the document.

sure

Ok, let me rephrase that .. sure it's possible, but I can imagine 
it would be quite complicated

now was that a question of the "can you give me the solution" kind?

actually it can be done quite simply... depends on the headers themselves...

It's a little complicated because the headers can have spaces in 
them.

spaces add no complication to the system, as long as the headers 
can be identified without doubt.

so the rule is :

headers start on new line, stop at first ":" 
all the rest is content?

now if you have a rule
copy text [ to "a:" | to "b:" .... ] 

but if b: occurs before a: in the text, then you will include a header 
in copied text

forget to and thru... they are not proper parsing.

yes, headers start on a newline and terminate in ":"

and there can be no ":" within the content?

No, there can be a ":" in the content

but you know what the headers are ... so that's not a big problem.

ok, so they are explicit... then its very easy.

can you give the name of some the headers... or an example.... so 
far it looks like a really simple rule to me.

eg. "social history:"

and you want the output in neat blocks I guess.

give me 1 minute

so I guess we can masks for each possible header

^/social history:

or apply the rule recursively until it is false

I can assume it starts at a header?

might be leading newlines

or white spaces

ok, but no content or stray letters?

shouldn't be yet.

So, I am trying to create an object from a semi structured document 
where the object elements are in any order or missing.

almost done...

ok, so we replace the spaces in the headers by "-"  and create an 
object out of all the code...

all the content... rather

I guess I can do it without using parse .. just replace all the headers 
with a mark, that allows me to split off all the sections, and then 
i can match the sections with all the section headers.

I'm almost done... I like these little parse tests.. It keeps my 
mind sharp on using parse  ;-)

But I don't need parse!  :)

are you asleep ? :-)

its working but its skipping the first tag for some reason.

Huh?  just dozing ...

aaahh there is no newline on the start of the text hehehe

graham, obviously the simplest solution is to read/lines.

read/lines doesn't work on text in memory AFAIK