File Handling#
General information about peak and feature maps#
For general information about a peak or feature map, use the FileInfo tool.
It can print RT, m/z and intensity ranges, the overall number of peaks, and the distribution of MS levels.
It can print a statistical summary of intensities.
It can print some meta information.
It can validate XML files against their schema.
It can check for corrupt data in peak files See the
FileInfo –help
for details.
Problems with input files#
If you are experiencing problems while processing an XML file, check if the file does validate against the XML schema:
FileInfo -v -in infile.mzML
Validation is available for several file formats including mzML, mzData, mzXML, featureXML and idXML.
Another frequently-occurring problem is corrupt data. You can check for corrupt data in peak files with FileInfo
as well:
FileInfo -c -in infile.mzML
Converting your files to mzML#
The TOPP tools work only on the HUPO-PSI mzML
format. If you need to convert mzData, mzXML or ANDI/MS data to
mzML, use the FileConverter, e.g.
FileConverter -in infile.mzXML -out outfile.mzML
For format names as file extension, the tool derives the format from the extension. For other extensions, the file formats of the input and output file can be given explicitly.
Converting between DTA and mzML#
Sequest DTA files can be extracted from a mzML file using the DTAExtractor
:
DTAExtractor -in infile.mzML -out outfile
The retention time of a scan, the precursor mass-to-charge ratio (for MS/MS scans) and the file extension are appended to the output file name.
To combine several files (e.g. DTA files) to an mzML
file use the FileMerger
:
FileMerger -in infile_list.txt -out outfile.mzML
The retention times of the scans can be generated, taken from the infile_list.txt
or can be extracted from the DTA
file names. See the FileMerger documentation for details.
Extracting part of the data from a file#
To extract part of the data from an mzML
file, use the FileFilter
tool. It allows filtering for RT, m/z
and
intensity range or for MS level. To extract the MS/MS scans between retention time 100
and 1500
, use the following
command:
FileFilter -in infile.mzML -levels 2 -rt 100:1500 -out outfile.mzML