ABIF stands for Applied Biosystem Inc. Format, a binary format modeled after TIFF format.
Corresponding files usually have an *.ab1 or *.fsa extension.
The size in bytes of the file, defaulting to what is returned by file.info
pied.de.pilote
Safety factor: the argument n to readBin is set as pied.de.pilote*max.bytes.in.file.
verbose
logical [FALSE]. If TRUE verbose mode is on.
Value
A list with three components: Header which is a list that contains various low-level information, among which numelements is the number of elements in the directory and dataoffset the offset to find the location of the directory. Directory is a data.frame for the directory of the file with the number of row being the number of elements in the directory and the 7 columns describing various low-level information about the elements. Data is a list with the number of components equal to the number of elements in the directory.
Details
All data are imported into memory, there is no attempt to read items on the fly.
References
Charif, D. and Lobry, J.R. (2007) Structural approaches to sequence evolution: Molecules, networks, populations ISBN 978-3-540-35305-8, pp 207-232.