In order to provide a canonicalized form of the BGP-4 AS_PATH along with the human-readable bgp4V2NlriAsPathString, which may be truncated, this object contains the contents of the BGP-4 AS_PATH Path Attribute. This object may be parsed using the rules defined for Four-octet ASes as defined in RFC 4893. RFC 4271, Section 4.3, 'Path Attributes: b) AS_PATH' as amended by RFC 5065, Section 3 defines the general format of the AS_PATH path attribute and its code points. In brief, the AS_PATH is composed of a sequence of AS Segments. Each AS Segment is represented by a triple: <path segment type, path segment length, path segment value>. The path segment type and path segment length fields are one octet in length each. The path segment type field may be one of: 1 - AS_SET (RFC 4721, Section 4.3) 2 - AS_SEQUENCE (RFC 4721, Section 4.3) 3 - AS_CONFED_SEQUENCE (RFC 3065, Section 5) 4 - AS_CONFED_SET (RFC 3065, Section 5) The path segment length field contains the number of ASes (not the number of octets) in the path segment value field. The path segment value field contains one or more AS numbers, each encoded as a 4-octet length field in network byte order. Note that since an SNMP agent may truncate this object to less than its maximum theoretical length of 4072 octets users of this object should be prepared to deal with a truncated and thus malformed AS_PATH. It is RECOMMENDED that when such truncation would occur on the boundary of an encoded AS that the partial AS be discarded from this object and the object's size be adjusted accordingly. Further, it is also RECOMMENDED that when such truncation, either alone or in conjuction with the truncation of a partially encoded AS described previously, would yield an empty path segment value field that the path segment type and path segment length components of the truncated AS_PATH also be discarded and the object's size be adjusted accordingly.