SMILES Notation Explained: How Chemists Write Molecules as Text

SMILES (Simplified Molecular-Input Line-Entry System) is a compact text representation of molecular structures developed in the 1980s. It encodes atoms, bonds, branches, and rings using ASCII characters. For example, aspirin is written as CC(=O)Oc1ccccc1C(=O)O. SMILES is widely used in chemical databases, computational chemistry, and drug discovery because computers can easily parse and compare molecular structures from these strings..

.