Regular expressions in FastaChar¶
What is a regular expression anyway?¶
Adapted from wikipedia :
The phrase regular expressions, also called regexes, is often used to mean the specific, standard textual syntax for representing patterns for matching text. Each character in a regular expression (that is, each character in the string describing its pattern) is either a metacharacter, having a special meaning, or a regular character that has a literal meaning.
For example, in the regex ‘a.’, a is a literal character which matches just ‘a’, while ‘.’ is a metacharacter that matches every character except a newline. Therefore, this regex matches, for example, ‘a ‘, or ‘ax’, or ‘a0’. Together, metacharacters and literal characters can be used to identify text of a given pattern, or process a number of instances of it.
Pattern matches may vary from a precise equality to a very general similarity, as controlled by the metacharacters. For example, ‘.’ is a very general pattern, [a-z] (match all lower case letters from ‘a’ to ‘z’) is less general and a is a precise pattern (matches just ‘a’). The metacharacter syntax is designed specifically to represent prescribed targets in a concise and flexible way to direct the automation of text processing of a variety of input data, in a form easy to type using a standard ASCII keyboard.
In FastaChar we use regular expressions to parse the header strings belonging to the sequences in fasta files.
Extensive information on regular expression can be found in sources on the internet, for example https://www.rexegg.com/regex-quickstart.html.
How do we use regular expressions in FastaChar?¶
When FastaChar reads a fasta file with aligned sequences, this file can have a number of sequences pertaining to one taxon. For the analysis we would like to compare the sequences of this taxon with those of other taxa. In order to select all the sequences of a given taxon and label them with one name, the species name, FastaChar needs some way of knowing how to interpret the headers in the fasta files. This may be best illustrated using an example.
Example¶
Let us say we have a fasta file with the following entry:
>WBET001_Nototeredo_norvagica_Ms_TK
TACTTTGTATTTTATTTTTTCTATTTGAGCGGGTTTGGT.....
Here we see that the first line is the header, as it starts with a “>”. The header string is aparently composed of the lab id followed by the species description, using an underscore to separate them. The header format now becomes:
{ID}_{SPECIES}
In order to specify the regular expression for the ID string, we need to know how the other id’s in this file look like. If we know that all lab codes start with ‘WBET’, we could specify something like:
WBET[0-9]+
which should be interpreted as the id starts with WBET and is followed by at least one numerical, but nothing else. THe WBET part is taken literal. The part between [ ] represents the position of one single character. In this case this character can be any in the range from 0 to 9. The + means that the preceding character (or possible characters) can be repeated.
This would work for this example, but when a different file is opened, then this expression might not match. As an alternative approach we could be more general. So we may say that the id may contain alphanumeric characters and a period, and at least one character. This translates to:
[A-Za-z0-9\.]+
Now the first character can be anything from upper case and lower case letters that appear in the (English) alphabet, any digits from 0 - 9 and a period. The symbol . has a special meaning in regular expressions, so that if the literal symbol is meant, it must be escaped by a backslash. What follows of the id string should be a character that follows the same restriction as the first character does, as indicated by the + symbol.
This representation would match our example WBTE001, but also PC025239.1, or ZSM20100595. Similar considerations apply to how the regular expression should be described for the species string.
Can we disable the use of regular expressions?¶
It can be, of course, that species names and lab codes within a single fasta file do not adhere to a specific format, or they are formatted in such a way that it is not easy to find a regular expression pattern that works for all entries. The solution in such a case would be to specify a regular expression that captures all.
The header format then reads:
{SPECIES}
the field for the regular expression for the ID or lab code, Regex ID, can be left empty, and the regular expression for the species, Regex SPECIES becomes:
.*
which captures all characters.