asn2xml

Quick Start

• Command: asn2xml < input.asn > output.xml
• Local executable: /home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/asn2xml
• Full reference: See references/help.md for complete documentation

When To Use This Tool

• Convert ASN.1 records into XML so they can be inspected with xtract or other XML tooling.
• Bridge older NCBI / EDirect data representations into the XML-centric parts of a pipeline.
• Normalize ASN.1 content before storing or diffing records in text-oriented workflows.

Common Patterns

# 1) Convert an ASN.1 record to XML
asn2xml < record.asn > record.xml

# 2) Convert and inspect selected fields immediately
asn2xml < record.asn | xtract -pattern "*" -element "*" | sed -n '1,20p'

Recommended Workflow

1. Start with a representative ASN.1 payload from the upstream source you actually use.
2. Run asn2xml through stdin redirection or a pipe.
3. Validate that non-empty XML is produced before batching larger jobs.
4. Pass the XML to xtract, xml2json, or other downstream converters as needed.

Guardrails

• This is a thin wrapper around transmute -a2x, so the companion transmute binary must also be on PATH.
• The current build does not expose a real --help or --version interface.
• Prefer stdin redirection or pipes; positional-argument behavior is not documented by the wrapper itself.
• Unsupported or malformed ASN.1 can result in empty output rather than a friendly format-specific error message.