CIF Applications. VI. CIFLIB: an application program interface to CIF dictionaries and data files

A software library is described that provides simple and convenient access to information in Crystallographic Information File (CIF) dictionaries and data files. This library gives the application programmer a collection of high-level functions that can be used to process and check data stored in the CIF format using the full detail of the CIF dictionary of crystallographic terminology. Two applications are presented that demonstrate the features of the library: a CIF browser and a CIF dictionary-to-HTML converter.