[Biopython-dev] Proposal: Parse and read in SeqIO and NCBIXML

[Sebastian Bassi]

In SeqIO there is parse and read. Parse return an iterable with all
the record found in the file, while read return only a record and it
is used when we know that the file has only one record. This is OK.
But in NCBIXML, there is only parse. If the the ncbiblast output has
only one record (because it was made from 1 query), now we have to
write:
NCBIXML.parse(x).next() or iterate over a "list" of one member. I
think it would be nice to add a read method to NCBIXML, such as the
one in SeqIO.