dnaio#

dnaio processes FASTQ and FASTA files#

dnaio is a Python 3.8+ library for very efficient parsing and writing of FASTQ and also FASTA files. The code was previously part of the Cutadapt tool and has been improved significantly since it has been split out.

Example usage#

The main interface is the dnaio.open function:

import dnaio

with dnaio.open("reads.fastq.gz") as f:
    bp = 0
    for record in f:
        bp += len(record)
print(f"The input file contains {bp/1E6:.1f} Mbp")

For more, see the tutorial and API documentation.

Installation#

Using pip:

pip install dnaio zstandard

zstandard can be omitted if support for Zstandard (.zst) files is not required.

Features and supported file types#

FASTQ input and output
FASTA input and output
BAM input
Compressed input and output (.gz, .bz2, .xz and .zst are detected automatically)
Paired-end data in two files
Interleaved paired-end data in a single file
Files with DOS/Windows linebreaks can be read
FASTQ files with a second header line (after the +) are supported

Limitations#

Multi-line FASTQ files are not supported
FASTQ and BAM parsing is the focus of this library. The FASTA parser is not as optimized