Oh, this format was fun. You could see history unfold when parsing it. The messages I parsed were ISO-8583 with ~EBCDIC~ no, BCD. But one field contained XML. And the XML had an embedded JSON. The inner format matched the fashion trend of the year when someone had to extend the message with extra data. :-)
> The messages I parsed were ISO-8583 with ~EBCDIC~ no, BCD.
The "great" thing about most ISO 8583 implementations I've worked with (all mutually incompatible at the basic syntactic level!) is that they usually freely mix EBCDIC, ASCII, BCD, UTF-8, and hexadecimal encoding across fields.
