How to store stereochemistry in Mol files II

Following on from earlier work, I decided to resurrect Open Babel's support for storing stereo in 0D Mol files. I always liked this idea, but at the time, I removed it before release because no-one else did. Well, now Craig James tells me he likes it too, so it's back in and will be available in OB 2.3.2.

Simply put, in OB 2.3.2 tetrahedral and cis/trans stereo can be roundtripped through a 0D Mol file by using an extension to the defacto standard, as follows:

obabel -:"I/C=C/C[C@](F)(Br)Cl" -omol | obabel -imol -osmi
I/C=C/C[C@](F)(Br)Cl

With the current release, cis/trans stereo is only preserved if you generate 2D coordinates ("--gen2D") although tet stereo can be read from the chiral flags for 0D files if you specify "-as".

How does the extension work? Well, for tet stereo it just uses the chiral flags (in defiance of the spec which says to ignore chiral flags on reading - take that spec!!). For cis/trans stereo it uses Up/Down markings equivalent to those used by SMILES; all of the (at most) 4 stereobonds are given Up/Down markings; if two bonds at either end are both Up or both Down this implies cis.

A better way to do it would have been to use a double bond flag equivalent to the chiral flag - e.g. 1 means that the first two bonds that appear in the bond section are cis - this would be both easier to compute and to interpret; however it would push the spec a bit too far.