Parsing: Why not get as far as you can, and give me the result? [Kit George]

Dmitriy Zaslavskiy asked recently:

Can you add an overload that parses as much as it can and returns number of parsed characters.

I'm interpreting this as something which would go on our basetypes Dmitry, and it is an interesting idea: a nice variation on our existing parsing functionality. I've added it to our tracking schedule as something to consider for the future. Thanks for the suggestion!