\, ??

[Iwei Yeh]

Hi-

I had a question about the syntax of the text file.  In the process
section, I see a lot of \, in the names and then comments that look like
anatomical regions, mechanisms etc.  Is this just a comment field or
really part of the name?

Thanks
Iwei Yeh

**************************************************************************
Moderator note:

The GO group has now started to use the new GO ontology editor
software from UC Berkeley and it escapes several characters in its
output.  Below is a message from John Richter (jmrichter at lbl.gov) the
developer of GO-EDIT.

-Mike

--------------------------------------------------------------------------


The backslashes are only included in the flat files as a way to escape
reserved characters INSIDE PLAINTEXT FIELDS. They will be hidden on
display, because they aren't part of the text; they're simply there to
escape reserved characters.

Reserved characters are characters that are used to seperate GO
tokens. They are:

  ,
  ;
  :
  <
  %
  \

These characters should only be escaped when they actually occur as part
of text, such as a term name, a synonym name, a database key, etc. They
should not be preceded by a backslash if they are actually being used as a
seperator character in the flat file.

Sometimes a \ escape character is optional. For example, unescaped commas
may appear in a term name. The GO Flat File outputter always puts in every
optional \.

Finally, ANY character may be escaped with a backslash, including
non-reserved characters. For example, \e is a legal sequence in the GO
flat files that will be treated like the character "e".


        -John

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