Re: [VCFtools-spec] Wishlist for 4.2: allow space characters in INFO

[Peter C. <p.j...@go...>]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Eric Banks <eb...@br...> wrote:
> I personally use awk with my VCFs all the time.  It would be very
> unfortunate if we lost the ability to do simple awk queries on VCFs because
> we start to allow whitespace in the INFO field.
> I don't see why we should have the spec change to conform to the random
> tools out there who don't adhere to 4.1.  It's just not a compelling reason.
> I'd much rather maintain the ability to use awk and require that external
> tools adhere to the official spec.
> -e

Could you mandate spaces be encoded as %20 as in GFF3? That would
require/assume people are not already using the percentage sign as is.

Peter