PyCIFRW provides support for reading and writing CIF (Crystallographic Information Format) files using Python. It was developed at the Australian National Beamline Facility (ANBF), run by the Australian Synchrotron Research Program (ASRP), as part of a larger project to provide CIF input/output capabilities for data collection. It is now (Jan 2015) maintained and developed within the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).

It is available at https://pypi.org/project/PyCifRW/

PyCIFRW is used by PolyXSim to simulate multigrain diffraction based in a CIF file input. CIF-based input will not work if you do not have this python package installed.