Chemical File Format - Distinguishing Formats

Distinguishing Formats

Chemical information is usually provided as files or streams and many formats have been created, with varying degrees of documentation. The format can be found by three means (see chemical MIME section)

• file extension (usually 3 letters). This is widely used, but fragile as common suffixes such as ".mol" and ".dat" are used by many systems, including non-chemical ones.
• self-describing files where the format information is included in the file. Examples are CIF and CML.
• chemical/MIME type added by a chemically-aware server.