[Bioperl-l] Bio::FeatureIO::gff

[Mark Johnson]

I recently had to do some gff3 generation/munging, so I took a look at
Bio::FeatureIO::gff.  I ran into a few issues:

- The _handle_feature method (called by next_feature) attaches Dbxref
attributes using 'Dbxref' as the key.  However, _write_feature_3 uses
'dblink' for the key when looking for Dbxref attributes.  I changed
_handle_feature to use 'dblink' also, but I'm not sure that's any more
(or less) correct than changing _write_feature_3 to use 'Dbxref'.
Anybody have any strong opinions one way or the other?

- Sendu made some changes to _write_feature_25 and _write_feature_3,
but missed a line in _write_feature_3.  I think line 890 should be

  my $phase  = defined($feature->phase) ? (ref($feature->phase) ?
$feature->phase->value : $feature->phase) : '.';

instead of

  my $phase  = $feature->phase->value;

to be consistent.

- Also in _write_feature_3, the Dbxref attributes are wrapped in a
call to uri_escape().  This generates a mangled gff3 that Apollo, at
least, does not like.  Also, looking at the gff3 spec, I do not
believe this is correct behaviour.  Quoting
http://www.sequenceontology.org/gff3.shtml:

The value of both Ontology_term and Dbxref is the ID of the cross
referenced object in the form "DBTAG:ID".  The DBTAG indicates which
database the referenced object can be found in, and ID indicates the
identifier of the object within that database.  IDs can contain
unescaped colons but DBTAGs cannot, so parsing code should split on
the first colon encountered in the attribute value.

So the key (DBTAG) should be escaped, but not the value (ID).  The
code presently escapes both:

  my $vstring = join ',', map {uri_escape($_->database .':'.
$_->primary_id)} @v;

which should probably be something like

  my $vstring = join ',', map {uri_escape($_->database) .':'.
$_->primary_id} @v;


So, what are the plans for Bio::FeatureIO?  I find it kind of handy,
so unless it's going to be scrapped in favor of something else, any
objection to lobbing a ticket and patch at Bugzilla?