esl-reformat(1)

NAME

esl-reformat - convert sequence file formats

SYNOPSIS
esl-reformat [options] format seqfile

DESCRIPTION
esl-reformat reads the sequence file seqfile in any supported format, reformats it into a new format specified by format, then outputs the reformatted text. The format argument must (case-insensitively) match a supported sequence file format: currently, limited to fasta, stockholm, or pfam. Unaligned format files cannot be reformatted to aligned formats. However, aligned formats can be reformatted to unaligned formats - gap characters are simply stripped out.

OPTIONS

-d  DNA; convert U's to T's, to make sure a nucleic acid sequence is shown as DNA not RNA. See -r.

-h  Print brief help; includes version number and summary of all options, including expert options.

-l  Lowercase; convert all sequence residues to lower case. See -u.

-n  For DNA/RNA sequences, converts any character that's not unambiguous RNA/DNA (e.g. ACGTU/acgtu) to an N. Used to convert IUPAC ambiguity codes to N's, for software that can't handle all IUPAC codes (some public RNA folding codes, for example). If the file is an alignment, gap characters are also left unchanged. If sequences are not nucleic acid sequences, this option will corrupt the data in a predictable fashion.

-o <f>
    Send output to file <f> instead of stdout.

-r  RNA; convert T's to U's, to make sure a nucleic acid sequence is shown as RNA not DNA. See -d.

-u  Uppercase; convert all sequence residues to upper case. See -l.

-x  For DNA sequences, convert non-IUPAC characters (such as X's) to N's. This is for compatibility with benighted people who insist on using X instead of the IUPAC ambiguity character N. (X is for ambiguity in an amino acid residue).

    Warning: like the -n option, the code doesn't check that you are actually giving it DNA. It simply literally just converts non-IUPAC DNA symbols to N. So if you accidentally give it protein sequence, it will happily convert most every amino acid residue to an N.

EXPERT OPTIONS

--dewuss
    Convert RNA secondary structure annotation strings from the new WUSS notation, <>, back to the old KHS format, ><. If the annotation is already in KHS, this option will corrupt it, without warning. Only SELEX and Stockholm format files have secondary structure markup.

--fullwuss
    Convert RNA secondary structure annotation strings from simple (input) WUSS notation to full (output) WUSS notation.

--gapsym <c>
    Convert all gap characters to <c>. Used to prepare alignment files for programs with strict requirements for gap symbols. Only makes sense if the input seqfile is an alignment.

--informat <s>
    Specify that the sequence file is in format <s>, rather than allowing the program to autodetect the file format.

--mingap
    If seqfile is an alignment, remove any columns that contain 100% gap characters, minimizing the overall length of the alignment. (Often useful if you've extracted a subset of aligned sequences from a larger alignment.)

--nogap
    Remove any aligned columns that contain any gap symbols at all. Useful as a prelude to phylogenetic analyses, where you only want to analyze columns containing 100% residues, so you want to strip out any columns with gaps in them. Only makes sense if the file is an alignment file.

--wussify
    Convert RNA secondary structure annotation strings (both consensus and individual) from old "KHS" format, ><, to the new WUSS notation, <>. If the notation is already in WUSS format, this option will screw it up, without warning. Only SELEX and Stockholm format files have secondary structure markup at present.

AUTHOR
Easel and its documentation are @EASEL_COPYRIGHT@. @EASEL_LICENSE@. See COPYING in the source code distribution for more details. The Easel home page is: @EASEL_URL@