length of a DNAString

Question

[c.chakraborty]

I am doing something extremely basic and stupid. I can call a fasta seq using this

x <- readDNAStringSet(file.choose())

file gets opened, and then I type this

length(x)

[1] 1 But when I use view, I can see nicely that it has 11405 bp. I can use seqinr to get the length, like

length(x[[1]])

But, I can't do anything more, how do I extract the sequence only? And how do I convert it to a DNAString?

[cpad0112]

type width(x). This would print the lengths of all sequences in DNAstringset object.

Answer 1

[h.mon]

The readDNAStringSet() reads a set of sequences from a file into an XStringSet object. To see the help page of the XStringSet-class, use:

?XStringSet

There you will find why length(x) returned 1:

length(x): The number of sequences in x.

For an DNAStringSet object, the function you want is width(). If you want a DNAString, you may extract just one element of the DNAStringSet and assign it to a new variable:

xString <- x[[1]]

Now, length(xString) will show the sequence length.

[c.chakraborty]

This is great, thanks a bunch! I also found a crude solution. If I load the files by ape and then unlist it, and then ask for length, it works!