Names in popmaps

[Eric Crandall]

My colleagues and I are trying to automate the Stacks pipeline such that it will work based on locality metadata that has been entered by others into the Genomic Observatories Metadatabase (GEOME). However, we are uncertain of what limitations Stacks has on population names entered into the popmap. What characters can Stacks handle? (spaces, commas, letters with accents, periods, dashes, etc) and how long can the names be?

Thanks for your help!

[Catchen, Julian]

The population map uses tabs to separate the columns, so your names should avoid whitespace. The underlying code uses the standard C++ library (iostream) to read the population map, so in principle it can use other locales with different encodings, but I haven’t tested that myself. There parsing code uses 1024 characters as the maximum line length, but if you exceed that it should throw and error and tell you.