dbiblast

[Peter Rice]

Asen Nenov wrote:
> 
> I wish to suggest a way of understanding the BLAST asn format.. Of
> course this is last hope method. :-)
> Use the converters asn->xml of NCBI and do something with the output.
> Then reversibly reconstruct the data format. Enjoy.

Unfortunately ... the blast databases have a *binary* format. No way to
convert this into ASN.1 (which EMBOSS could probably parse more easily than
XML).

I suppose reading the formatdb source code might help .... but it would
really help if NCBI could document their format. I'm sure they know other
software (EMBOSS, fasta, and others) is reading blast database files.

regards,

Peter