DOTS IN FLEXFIELD

We have new implementation of 11.5.10, I found an interesting thing about how not to use the dots as separator in the flexfield's, not much information about this was found on web.
Here comes the scenario, assuming that you are loading it into a single segment,
Say your flexfield looks something like this XX.YYY.ZZZ.2008
and with a condition that not all the parts of it are mandatory, so it could as well looks like

CASE1 XX..ZZZ.

CASE2 XX.YYY...

CASE1 it does not work, it does create an item though but you would never be able to create catalog elements for the same.
XX..ZZZ.. Is loaded in the mtl_system_items_b for column segment1 as XX..ZZZ (Observe the missing dot at the end

CASE2 XX.YYY...(observe it ends with 3 dots)
This item would be loaded as XX.YYY.

The case where you have dot in front won't help either.

Its definitely not advisable to use dots in the flexfield and loading into a single segment. The fix provided by oracle is use either '/' or a '-'.

We were using the dot as separator from past few days and ran into many problems and have now changed them to '-' and it fixed everything.