Syntax test suite for CIF

Here is a small suite of test files conforming (or not) to STAR/CIF syntax rules and designed as an aid to parser development.

• Latest version on Web (IUCr site)

The test files are listed below. Since they may be empty or contain a range of unusual characters designed to test CIF parsers, they may not show their contents clearly in a web browser and should be saved to a local working directory.

Files ciftest0 through 5 and 11 are syntactically valid; ciftest6 through 10 contain various common errors. Each file has a *.result.canon file that contains the output from a vcif validation run on that file. There is also a simple Unix shell script to run vcif on each file and compare the output with the canonical file as distributed.

Documentation and commentary are in the test files and in the vcif output.

For convenience, the file test.tar contains the test and output files and driver script in a Unix tar archive.

This collection was developed in May 2000 and tests the CIF 1.0 specification. New tests for CIF 1.1 are under development.

• ciftest0 Purpose: null file
• ciftest1 Purpose: a file containing only a CIF comment line
• ciftest2 Purpose: a CIF containing only a null data block
• ciftest3 Purpose: a minimal CIF with content
• ciftest4 Purpose: simple valid file conforming to CIF syntax
• ciftest5 Purpose: valid STAR/CIF file with potential traps for lazy parsers
• ciftest6 Purpose: error CIF: lacks initial data statement; other data_ faults
• ciftest7 Purpose: incorrectly terminated character strings - a common problem
• ciftest8 Purpose: wrong line and dataname lengths - valid STAR, broken CIF
• ciftest9 Purpose: things wrong with loops
• ciftest10 Purpose: non-printing characters
• ciftest11 Purpose: line endings - should parse OK