[BioPython] Regarding GenBank

Brad Chapman chapmanb at 50mail.com
Thu Aug 12 22:40:30 EDT 2004


Hi Kael;

> In my experience, there definitely is an upper limit on the size of the 
> genbank file you can index, and when you go over that limit you get exactly 
> that error.
> 
> Furthermore, apropos of Brads reply, files that fail for this reason can be 
> split and indexed fine - hence the minimal file that creates the problem is 
> the enormous beast that crashed the parser, not any particular record or 
> pair of records. (I have not gone back and checked this in 1.30)
> 
> I believe this has been discussed on the list before.  I recall that it was 
> attributed to underlying text handling libraries, and not the GenBank 
> module per se.

This did used to be true, but should be fixed with the 1.30 release,
since the file indexing uses a different underlying indexing system.
If you have files with failed with the old system (which did have
those limitations) please do check them to be sure they work on
1.30. However (fingers crossed) I do think this has been ironed out.

Brad


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