Read from middle of VCF file?

[biona001]

I suppose this package is the same as GeneticVariation.jl, but any chance this package will support multithreaded read? The standard

reader = VCF.Reader(open("example.vcf", "r"))
for record in reader
    # do something
end
close(reader)

requires looping over every record. On large VCF files, just looping through all records can take a few hours. Essentially we need some way to query the reader at the ith position.

[rasmushenningsson]

Yes, this is a feature that I would really like. There are other more urgent changes needed though, so there might take some time before I get to it.

My idea would be support index files (.tbi or .csi). Then you can create a Reader for e.g. a specific chromosome. And thus work in parallell on one file by working on different chromosomes on different threads. Would this be in line with what you need?

[biona001]

Yes, that sounds great! I'll try to look into index files too, and try to help out in some way if possible.

[janxkoci]

Since the indexed files usually use BGZF compression (a block-gzip variant), it may be useful to look at how the access is done on such files. Aside from tabix, grabix, and bcftools I noticed also a few Julia packages related to BGZF format, most notably BGZFStreams, but also packages handling BAM could be used for inspiration.