tab-delimited file - use in bedtools?

Question

[a.rex]

Hi,

I have a tab-delimited .txt file. However, instead of being arranged in columns the values appear like so:

Loci ID Lung proportion   Heart proportion   Kidney proportion^Mloc.40699281     51.70969181     15.88331538^Mloc.14331  5.255465101     86.04853954     8.695995364^M

The ^M seems to indicate where a new line should appear.

I then want to use this file for bedtools intersect with another bedfile containing the locus identities. Is this possible?

Thank you,

[WouterDeCoster]

Which operating system do you use? Did you prepare this file using a Windows program? Looks like a incorrect newline character. I'm not sure if it will help but you could try dos2unix (it often does work)

Answer 1

[michael.ante]

Hi a.rex,

The ^M is a representation of DOS' carriage return character. Just run dos2unix on that file. Since the data is not in bed-format, try to use join (here are some nice examples: https://shapeshed.com/unix-join/ and http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2012/10/15-linux-split-and-join-command-examples-to-manage-large-files/ ) .

Cheers,

Michael