Francis Ouellette writes:
> What is parsable today, may not be tomorrow! (I think they are
> giving us all a heads-up)
Yes, I figured this is what they meant. It worried me a bit that the
next version may not work with my code, and it worried me that perhaps
some strange input might cause the current code to output in a
different format. Then again it wasn't much work to write my parser,
so putting in a fix shouldn't be too much trouble.
> Everytime you parse a GB flat-file you loose some information,
> structure that was in the original ASN.1 file, which is the format
> that NCBI maintains all of the sequence data that we use on a
> regular basis, and for which the GBFF is simply a report, a human
> readable format that everybody _loves_ to parse! (see the wonderful
> chapter by Ostell and Kans on the 'NCBI data model' in
> "Bioinformatics: a practical guide to the analysis of genes and
> proteins" edited by Baxevanis and Ouellette.
Funny, I often find the "human readble" to be harder to parse than the
machine variety. But I haven't done any work with ASN.1 yet. Thanks
for the book pointer. :-)
--
George Armhold PGP Key: [02D2EBE5]
Rutgers University Fingerprint: [51 8B A4 B0 7A 71 7C E7]
Bioinformatics Initiative [85 DE 13 99 0B 68 5F 92]
