Read File Format .Bam

Question

[hudarembang]

My research is related to the manufacture of snp database. constraints that occurs is how to read the file. bam. in this case, I want to take the data from the file. bam whose content is an alignment. whether the file. bam it compressed? if I open it using notepad++, the data unreadable.

[Jimbou]

A very useful post about bam files: http://davetang.org/muse/2014/03/06/understanding-bam-flags/

Answer 1

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

It's bgzf compressed : http://samtools.github.io/hts-specs/SAMv1.pdf