NCBI API for finding accession numbers?

Question

[mills.wj]

Hi all,

Is there an API somewhere for fetching lists of accession numbers from NCBI that match some search criteria?

Context: I'd like to use their SRA Toolkit's 'prefetch' functionality (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK47540/#SRA_Download_Guid_B.The_SRA_Toolkit) to grab a bunch of sra files as part of a larger automated pipeline, but I don't want to have to cut and paste accession numbers one by one from a web-based search.

Answer 1

[5heikki]

You mean like Entrez Direct or the less user friendly eUtils?

[mills.wj]

Great, I'll look into those - thanks for the pointer!

[chefarov]

These are not APIs. It seems that there isn't anything that looks like API unfortunately.