/libfasta

An open source library for parsing FASTA files

Primary LanguageC

libfasta

An open source library for parsing FASTA files

Features

  • Supports files with multiple FASTA sequences, i.e. multi-FASTA
  • Support for reading sequence data into memory only on demand
  • Capable of indexing the FASTA files for faster repeated processing
  • API for processing user-defined coding sequences
  • No external dependencies

Compilation

To compile the sources inside a release tarball, use the following commands:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

If you want to compile the sources in a cloned repository, you'll have to generate the configure script and other files, which aren't part of the repository. To do that, use the autogen.sh script:

$ ./autogen.sh

After completion of this command, you should be able to run the above mentioned commands to compile and install the library

Using the library in your project

To access the C API defined in the installed header file, use the following include statement in your C/C++ source file:

#include <libfasta/fasta.h>

When you install the library from a release tarball or a distribution package, it should also install a pkg-config file which makes it easier to link to the library at compile-time, e.g.:

$ gcc -o program $(pkg-config libfasta --cflags --libs) program.c

If you are using an Autotools or CMake based project, you can use the PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro or PKG_CHECK_MODULES CMake command respectively.

Otherwise, you'll have to explicitly specify that you want to link to the library like this:

$ gcc -o program -lfasta program.c

If you installed the files into a non-standard location, set the include and library path:

$ gcc -o program -I/custom/location/include -L/custom/location/lib -lfasta program.c