This document describes the Character Handling Routine library, CHR, and its use. The CHR library augments the limited character handling facilities provided by the Fortran 77 standard. It offers a range of character handling facilities: from formatting Fortran data types into text strings and the reverse, to higher level functions such as wild card matching, string sorting, paragraph reformatting and justification. The library may be used simply for building text strings for interactive applications or as a basis for more complex text processing applications.