[EMBOSS] Help with retrieving the indexing date

[Wells, Isabelle]

Hi Peter,

Thanks very much for the info. We found the script and were able to
write a program which reads this date. We don't have SRS databases but
an extra option in showdb to show the date would have been useful.

Best regards,
Isabelle

-----Original Message-----
From: pmr at ebi.ac.uk [mailto:pmr at ebi.ac.uk] 
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 17:37
To: Wells, Isabelle {PRBI~Basel}
Cc: emboss at embnet.org
Subject: Re: [EMBOSS] Help with retrieving the indexing date


Hi Isabelle,

> I am using dbiflat to index our databases with the option -date 
> dd/mm/yy. It seems this date should be stored in the binary index 
> files. Is there a way or a tool to extract this date from the file? 
> Thanks for your help,

There is a script that is included in the scripts directory for
debugging.

I would like to extract information such as the index data when
retrieving sequences and in showdb, but it is complicated because only
the EMBLCD databases (index by dbiflat and the other dbi tools in
EMBOSS) have the date easily available. We could, perhaps, try to get
the date for SRS and SRSWWW and SRSFASTA databases. We could also look
into retrieving dates from the new indexing system under development to
replace EMBLCD (and dbiflat).

How useful would this be? Perhaps as an extra option to showdb, because
it will be slow to retrieve the information from a lareg number of
external databases.

Hope this helps,

Peter Rice