[BioPython] Question about FeatureLocation objects

[Brad Chapman]

Hey Andy;

> I noticed that the FeatureLocation start and end attributes are not type
> Œint¹ but type Œinstance¹ which makes operations like this
> Loc.end ­ loc.start break
> 
> And int(loc.start) also fails.
> 
> One needs to do
>  int(str(location.start))
> 
> Now I am new to python, is there a reason that start and end are not int
> objects?

It's because of the mess of fuzzy locations. The start and end can
be single integers, or any of the various GenBank/EMBL-style fuzzy
locations ((2.3), (2^3), <2, >2). If you want to ignore the fuzzy
locations and just deal with integers (which is what I read that you
want to do from your mail), there is already a hook to do this. Just
use loc.nofuzzy_start and loc.nofuzzy_end instead of loc.start and
loc.end.

Hopefully this helps.
Brad