[Biococoa-dev] strider and gck format

[Koen van der Drift]

Hi,

I am still a bit confused about the strider and gck formats. In his  
code, Alex uses the following snippet to determine if a file is one  
of both formats:

- (NSDictionary *)readFile:(NSString *)textFile
{
     NSMutableDictionary *theContents;
     NSString *lineBreak;
     	
	// BINARY
	// Strider?
     if([NSHFSTypeOfFile(textFile) isEqualToString: @"'xDNA'"]){

		theContents =  (NSMutableDictionary*) [self readStriderFile:textFile];

	// GCK?
	}else if([NSHFSTypeOfFile(textFile) isEqualToString: @"'GCKc'"] ||  
[NSHFSTypeOfFile(textFile) isEqualToString: @"'GCKs'"]){
		
		theContents =  (NSMutableDictionary*) [self readGCKFile:textFile];

	// TEXT
	}else {
		

So it's based on the file type. However, looked on the net for some  
sample files to test the code, and found those, but almost none of  
them have the xDNA, GCKc, or GCKs extension. So those files will be  
skipped by the code.  For all other formats we use a recognition  
string within the file, eg > for fasta or HEADER for PDB's.  I think  
that is a better approach, since we are not dependent on file types  
but on file content.

Is there a typical recognition string for these data formats that we  
can use for file recognition? If not, is there another way we can  
make sure we catch all Strider and/or GCK files?

cheers,

- Koen.