Sunday, December 18, 2016

Convert FASTA files to One Read / One line in WINDOWS

Some of the Big Data coming off the interweb unfortunately doesn't have each 'Read' starting on a new line - programmatically, this makes data reading and manipulation more difficult. Here's the quick and dirty (and suprizingly fast) fix.

The shortcut keys are for Windows - if you have a computer named after a fruit or that other one which makes you type a lot there will be something similar.

1: Open the FASTA file in notepad.
2: Open "Search and Replace" <Ctrl + H>.
3: Replace All ">" with "<br>".
4: Save the file and open it in your favourite browser - Now you see!
5: Select All <Ctrl + A>, Copy <Ctrl + C> and Paste <Ctrl + V> back into notepad.
6: Optionally Replace All "<br>" with ">" and save - Job Done!