Trying to upgrade dreg

[Peter Rice]

Henrikki Almusa wrote:
> Hello 
> 
> I'm trying to test my c skills with Emboss. And decided to start by trying to 
> modify dreg to print out in emboss report format. I've made some changes and 
> got it to print out a report. Unfortunately I haven't been completely 
> succesful in modifying this. So here I am to ask for help and guidance :). So 
> my questions are. What i'm doing wrong here? And how to fix it?

You are close .... look at fuzznuc for a similar program.

The main problem is that you need to initialize hit_name, otherwise the 
feature is not created. We will add an error message for that condition.

Also, there is no need (and it is bad practice) to use a string instead 
of a regexp as the input in the ACD file. You can keep the original 
code. I assume you did it to have the original pattern for the report - 
but that is what acdGetValue does.

An example modified dreg.c is attached. I tested it, but will not commit it.

> Once this is done I'm planning to try change preg similarly. Or better yet, i 
> think,  to modify one of them so that it read both amino acid and nucleotide 
> sequences, since the regex shouldn't care what strings it is used to test on.

There are advantages to keeping them separate. One is the ability to add 
validation in the regular expressions. This is very complex if they can 
be DNA or protein.

Please do send in a modified dreg and preg - we can credit you with 
making the changes!

Hope this helps

Peter