You can configure ECS to read and write arbitrary 8-bit text events, containing any 8-bit text value except null (0). This permits the correlation of events based on ISO8859-1 (Latin-1 or 8-bit "ASCII") or other 8-bit characters.

ECS needs to know the structure of an event in order to decode or encode it. A high level endecoder configuration language, the Message Description Language ( MDL) , is therefore provided for specifying 8-bit text event structure. The full specification of the language is given in the MDL syntax.

MDL can also define how the engine should obtain values for the event header creation time and event type attributes. While these header attributes are not part of the native event, they are required for internal engine use.