Curious again!

Well, if you want to get the laugh of the century , check out page 13 of the "MDS 3.0 Data Specifications Documentation", which just came out yesterday. (copied below for your enjoyment...)


Two special values have been reserved for use on certain items:
o Dashes (-) are used to indicate that an item was not assessed. For example, if a resident is in a facility for only a few days, it may not be possible to complete the entire assessment. In this case, the assessor may indicate for certain items that the item was not assessed. Dashes are allowed on most, but not all, items. When a dash is allowed for an item, it will be listed in the "Item Values" table. A dash must not be submitted for items where the "Item Value" table does not list it as an allowable value. Submitting dashes for such items will result in a fatal error. When a dash is allowed, a single dash should be submitted for the item regardless of the item's normal length.
o Carrots(^) are used in the submission file to indicate that an item has been skipped due to a skip pattern or, for certain text items, that the item has been left blank by the assessor. If an item is active for given type of assessment but has been skipped because it is in a skip pattern, then the XML tags for the item must be included in the XML file and a single carrot must be submitted as the value between the element's tags. Note that carrots are allowed for only some items, as indicated by the "Item Values" table. Also note that carrots have a somewhat different use for the diagnosis code items (I8000A through A8000J). Like other items, a single carrot is used to indicate that a given diagnosis code is entirely blank. For non-blank diagnosis codes, carrots are used to indicate blank characters within the code itself. Please refer to the edits for the diagnosis code items for more details.
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Where edits refer to values of an item, those values are always enclosed in brackets. For example, an edit might say, "If C0500=[‐,99], then if C0600 is active it must equal [0]". This statement means, "If the value of C0500 is equal to "-" (dash) or the value of C0500 is equal to "99", then if C0600 is active its value must be equal to 0 (zero)". The values contained within brackets should be understood to be character literals even though quotation marks have been omitted. Furthermore, when more than one value is listed, they are implicitly connected by a logical "OR". The following summarizes the conventions that are used when specifying values:
o [1,2,3] means "1" or "2" or "3".
o [00-15] means "00" through "15" (inclusive).
o [^ (blank)] means the carrot character, which indicates a blank.

CMS certainly showed alot of CHARACTER with this one!