International
Tables for
Crystallography
Volume G
Definition and exchange of crystallographic data
Edited by J. R. Hester and B. McMahon

© International Union of Crystallography 2026
International Tables for Crystallography (2026). Vol. G. Early view chapter

Section 1.1.4.2. General utility programs

James R. Hestera and Brian McMahonb

aAustralian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Locked Bag 2001, Kirrawee DC, NSW 2232, Australia, and bInternational Union of Crystallography, 5 Abbey Square, Chester CH1 2HU, UK.

1.1.4.2. General utility programs

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Some developers may wish to write generic programs to reorder, validate or otherwise transform CIFs (e.g to convert to a different format). Such developers will need a detailed understanding of the relevant format specifications (Chapters 2.2[link] , 2.3[link] ) and might also benefit from studying how edge cases are handled, for example by the CIF API (Chapter 5.2[link] ). If the goal is to transform CIF data into another syntactic representation, Chapter 2.6[link] might also provide some useful ideas.

Developers of applications that validate against dictionaries, or transform data based on relationships in the dictionaries (e.g to separate or merge data values and their standard uncertainties, or to convert matrices into lists of their individual components) should understand the DDL specifications in Chapter 2.4[link] . They may also be interested in implementing relational methods expressed in the dREL language (Chapter 2.5[link] ).








































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