I wonder if it might be possible to be able to instruct the patternsdb parser to ignore markup for the test_message. This is a minor quibble, but I do have some messages that I parse that could use something like a <![CDATA[]]> wrapper around the test_message text. If I do a 'pdbtool test --validate' against a database that includes the offending test_message I get an error, but if I wrap it in a CDATA it seems to run without error, although the parser doesn't actually seem to see that wrapped test message. I can also verify the test message with 'pdbtool match -M' command, so this isn't a big deal, just thought I'd bring attention to it and see if maybe I'm missing something or if this might be something to handle in a future release. John