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Limits of bcf POS field uint32_t?

What is/are the limits of the unsigned integer in the BCF format with regards to the POSITION (POS) field, which in the specification it is described as a:

BCF2 site information encoding Field Type l_shared uint32_t
Data length from CHROM to the end of INFO l_indiv uint32_t

Does it depend on being compiled for 64bit or 32bit architectures?

vcf bcf

1 answer

In C a uint32_t is always a 4 bytes-unsigned-integer whatever the architecture is.

So its' capacity goes from 0 to 2^32 =4,294,967,296

See also: The Longest Chromosome > Sizeof(Int32)

Well, 1-4,294,967,296 if we're talking about printed positions or 0-4,294,967,295 as stored in the file (the range is [0, 2^32-1]).

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