Hello there, I understand this is an old thread, but i was wondering if you managed to solve this problem? I face the same problem with a list of error and no flanking sequence file.

Thank you.

I checked the code from Meg Bowman, and apparently, at least in my case it had to do with whitespaces in the fasta deflines. In the original script there were these lines

my $repid = $seqobj1->display_id();
my $repdesc = $seqobj1->desc();
my $new_desc = $repdesc; 
$new_desc =~ s/ /_/g;
my $new_id = "$repid" . "_" . "$new_desc";
my $blank_desc = " "; 
$repdesc = $seqobj1->desc($blank_desc);
$repid = $seqobj1->display_id($new_id);
$seqout->write_seq($seqobj1);

and then the script parsed $repid to construct $silly_index and $ltr_start using

my ($silly_index, $ltr_start, $seq_id, $remid, $artificial_key, %artificial_key_hash, $i2, $key3);
my $removed = Bio::SeqIO->new (-format => 'fasta', -file => $removed_repeats);
while (my $seqobj2 = $removed->next_seq()) {
      $remid = $seqobj2->display_id();
      if ($remid =~ /^(.+)_\(/) {
        $seq_id = $1;
      }
      else {
      }
      if ($remid =~ /\(dbseq-nr_(\d+)\)_\[/) {
        $silly_index = $1;
      }
      if ($remid =~ /\[(\d+),/) {
        $ltr_start = $1;
      }

If you replace the first group of lines lines with

my $repid      = $seqobj1->display_id();
my $repdesc    = $seqobj1->desc();
my $new_desc   = $repdesc;
$new_desc      =~ s/.*\(dbseq-nr //g;
$new_desc      =~ s/\) \[/ /g;
$new_desc      =~ s/\,.*//g;
$repdesc       = $seqobj1->desc($new_desc);
$repid         = $seqobj1->display_id($repid);
$seqout->write_seq($seqobj1);

and the second group of lines with

my ($silly_index, $ltr_start, $seq_id, $remid, $remdesc, $artificial_key, %artificial_key_hash, $i2, $key3);
my $removed = Bio::SeqIO->new (-format => 'fasta', -file => $removed_repeats);
while (my $seqobj2 = $removed->next_seq()) {
      $remid   = $seqobj2->display_id();
      $remdesc = $seqobj2->desc();
      my @remdesc_arr = split " ", $remdesc;
      $seq_id = $remid;
      $silly_index = $remdesc_arr[0];
      $ltr_start = $remdesc_arr[1];

It should work fine. I'm no perl expert and there should be a better fix, but in the meantime this patch works. In my case there are 9 repeats, after step2 I have 19 additional files 1 with the filtered repeat sequences, 9 with the upstream sequences and 9 with the downstream sequences. Hope it helps