Crystallography Online: the website of the International Union of Crystallography

To answer my own question about end-of-line and end-of-file issues, I 
found that the section on <EOL> discusses the case of an unterminated 
last line, as well as new-line character differences. The actual 
behavior is undefined for anything except lines ending in native 
new-line marks, but with a suggestion that foreign new-lines and various 
types of line termination at EOF should be tolerated.

In general, it is better to think of CIF as a series of line-records 
where trailing spaces is insignificant (i.e. Fortran I/O). Likewise, it 
might be better to think of multi-line strings as a list/array of 
strings. The current definition is messy, where a single final backslash 
has no significance.

Joe