LIBXSIF: a standalone library for parsing the Standard Input Format

The Standard Input Format for the description of accelerator beamlines has achieved limited acceptance due to the complexity of the parser required. We describe a standalone library of Fortran-90 routines which can be used to parse a superset of the Standard Input format in use at SLAC, named Extended Standard Input Format (XSIF). This library provides authors of new simulation codes with a simple means of adding XSIF compatibility to their programs, and also permits users to add their own features to the parser with relative ease. As examples we describe the manner in which the linear accelerator code LIAR was modified to use LIBXSIF, and changes made to DIMAD to switch from its internal Standard Input Format parser to use of the external XSIF parser. URLs for the source code, documentation, and ready-to-use libraries are provided