Friday, April 14, 2017

NCBI's Eutils - Don't use LWP::Simple!!

I was having real problems with using NCBI's Eutils to download sequences. The program would work randomly. The 'get' commands would just return nothing sometimes, which was quite frustrating, and I attributed it to the Eutils server.

Turns out the problem was (is) the LWP perl module. When I switched to using a wget system call instead of LWP, everything worked consistently.

Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of there still being no good way to get a nucleotide sequence from a protein accession, but we take the little victories where we get them...