The difference between entret and such programs as seqret which also read entries from databases or files and write them to files, is that entret reads and writes the complete sequence entry together with the heading annotation (documentation) without attempting to reformat or interpret the data in any way. seqret on the other hand will read in the entry data, determine which bit of it is the sequence, which is the description line and which is the feature table and will then write the sequence, description and features out in the way prescribed by the sequence format which has been requested for output.
entret therefore is very useful for looking at the annotation of sequences from databases, which seqret does not provide.
The other main difference is that when it writes out the sequence entry to a file, the information is treated as text, not sequence, and so options that you would normally use to change the aspects of the sequence to be written will either not be recognised and will cause an error message to be written (e.g. '-osformat') or will be quietly ignored (e.g. '-sbegin', '-send').
In previous versions of EMBOSS, entret didn't return the sequence from entries held in GCG indexed databases. This has now been fixed. entret will now return the complete sequence entries with the annotation of GCG indexed databases.
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