Hi! everybody,
I am frustrated about these
compressed .vcf files that contains
a compiled list of variants related to genes.
My question is: how can I get access to the content of those files?
It is explained that they are compressed text files. So, I understand
that once decompressed, I can open them with any text editor software?
Or do I need VCFtools software to open them?
Thank you for your help!
bernard
A compressed text file can be opened in any word processor, or text processor once it is uncompressed.
The main problem with compressed files, is to find out what type of compression is used. If they want you to have easy access it will be compressed with something like Zip compression which is quite efficient when working with text. If they don't want you to have easy access they will only allow you to uncompress them with the tools software. To find out, simply get yourself a text editor of some description, (Not a word processor for this) and open the file in the text processor. (Notepad will do) most of the file will be untranslatable gibberish, but right at the start of the file, will be a header that is magic for the program to be sure it has the right type of file. If this has the word zip in it, the file is probably a zip file, and you can unpack it using a utility like winzip, or even in the newer windows OS, by clicking on the zipped folder icon.
In Unix/linux use an Archive manager, I can't tell you how to do it in OSX but it is probably similar to Unix.
I hope this advice helps
Hi! Thank you for the comment; actually they are .gz archive files.
So, I need Unix/linux Archive manager as you say.
There are gunzip and tar archiving tools for windows from GNU if you want them.
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