Package htsjdk.variant.vcf

Class VCFCodec

java.lang.Object
htsjdk.tribble.AbstractFeatureCodec<T,LineIterator>
htsjdk.tribble.AsciiFeatureCodec<VariantContext>
htsjdk.variant.vcf.AbstractVCFCodec
htsjdk.variant.vcf.VCFCodec
All Implemented Interfaces:
FeatureCodec<VariantContext,LineIterator>, NameAwareCodec
public class VCFCodec extends AbstractVCFCodec
A feature codec for the VCF 4 specification

VCF is a text file format (most likely stored in a compressed manner). It contains meta-information lines, a header line, and then data lines each containing information about a position in the genome.

One of the main uses of next-generation sequencing is to discover variation amongst large populations of related samples. Recently the format for storing next-generation read alignments has been standardised by the SAM/BAM file format specification. This has significantly improved the interoperability of next-generation tools for alignment, visualisation, and variant calling. We propose the Variant Call Format (VCF) as a standarised format for storing the most prevalent types of sequence variation, including SNPs, indels and larger structural variants, together with rich annotations. VCF is usually stored in a compressed manner and can be indexed for fast data retrieval of variants from a range of positions on the reference genome. The format was developed for the 1000 Genomes Project, and has also been adopted by other projects such as UK10K, dbSNP, or the NHLBI Exome Project. VCFtools is a software suite that implements various utilities for processing VCF files, including validation, merging and comparing, and also provides a general Perl and Python API. The VCF specification and VCFtools are available from http://vcftools.sourceforge.net.

See also: @see VCF specification
See also: @see VCF spec. publication

File format example

     ##fileformat=VCFv4.0
     #CHROM  POS     ID      REF     ALT     QUAL    FILTER  INFO    FORMAT  NA12878
     chr1    109     .       A       T       0       PASS  AC=1    GT:AD:DP:GL:GQ  0/1:610,327:308:-316.30,-95.47,-803.03:99
     chr1    147     .       C       A       0       PASS  AC=1    GT:AD:DP:GL:GQ  0/1:294,49:118:-57.87,-34.96,-338.46:99
Since:
2010

  • Field Details

  • Constructor Details

    • VCFCodec

      public VCFCodec()

  • Method Details

    • readActualHeader

      public Object readActualHeader(LineIterator lineIterator)
      Reads all of the header from the provided iterator, but no reads no further.
      Specified by:
      readActualHeader in class AsciiFeatureCodec<VariantContext>
      Parameters:
      lineIterator - the line reader to take header lines from
      Returns:
      The parsed header

    • parseFilters

      protected List<String> parseFilters(String filterString)
      parse the filter string, first checking to see if we already have parsed it in a previous attempt
      Specified by:
      parseFilters in class AbstractVCFCodec
      Parameters:
      filterString - the string to parse
      Returns:
      a set of the filters applied or null if filters were not applied to the record (e.g. as per the missing value in a VCF)

    • canDecode

      public boolean canDecode(String potentialInput)
      Description copied from interface: FeatureCodec

      This function returns true iff the File potentialInput can be parsed by this codec. Note that checking the file's extension is a perfectly acceptable implementation of this method and file contents only rarely need to be checked.

      There is an assumption that there's never a situation where two different Codecs return true for the same file. If this occurs, the recommendation would be to error out.

      Note this function must never throw an error. All errors should be trapped and false returned.
      Parameters:
      potentialInput - the file to test for parsability with this codec
      Returns:
      true if potentialInput can be parsed, false otherwise