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C# & Bioinformatics: Edit Strings and Local Alignment Subprofiles

with 2 comments

Alternatively: The awful finite string manipulation bug that took me forever to fix.

Update: Code last update 2010 Dec. 12 (branch logic fixed: gave default “else” case highest priority instead).

Every so often, a bug creeps in during the implementation of a utility function that halts an entire project until it can be fixed. I bumped into one that was so insidious — so retrospectively obvious — that I must share it with you. This particular bug has to do with the way Edit Strings behave when you use them to represent changes done during a Local Alignment rather than a Global Alignment.

Those of you who have looked into MUSCLE may have seen the 2004 BMC paper that goes into great detail about its implementation. In it, Dr. Edgar describes Edit Strings (e-strings) — these are integer strings which keep track of the edits performed on a sequence in order to insert gaps in the correct locations corresponding to an alignment.

I’ve previously discussed and explained e-strings and their use in sequence alignment here and also how to convert alignment strings (a recording of site-to-site insertions/deletions/substitutions) to edit strings here.

E-Strings in Local Alignments

E-strings weren’t originally designed with local alignments in mind — but that’s OK. We can make a few adjustments that will let us keep track of gaps the way we intend them. In a global alignment, all tokens (characters) in each of the aligned sequences are considered. In a local alignment, we need to be able to specify two aligned subsequences rather than the alignment of two full sequences. We can add a simple integer offset to indicate the number of positions since the beginning of aligned sequences to specify the start position of each subsequence.

These are two sequences s and t — (to keep things easy to visualize, I’ve just used characters from the English alphabet).

s = DEIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
t = ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOUVWXY

Assume that the following is the optimal global alignment of s and t.

s(global) = ---DE---IJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
t(global) = ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO-----UVWXY-

The corresponding edit strings for s and t are es and et respectively.

e(s, global) = < -3, 2, -3, 18 >
e(t, global) = < 15, -5, 5, -1 >

Remember, we can take the sum of the absolute values in two edit strings corresponding to the same alignment to be sure that they contain the number of sites. This is true because a site in a given sequence or profile must be either an amino acid (in a sequence) or a distribution of amino acids (in a profile) or a gap (in either). In this case, the absolute values of both es and et correctly add up to 26.

Now let’s adapt the above to local alignments.

The corresponding optimal local alignment for s and t is as follows.

s(local) = DE---IJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY
t(local) = DEFGHIJKLMNO-----UVWXY

The edit strings only need an offset to specify the correct start position in each sequence. Remember that our indexing is zero based, so the position for the character “A” was at position zero.

e(s, local) = 3 + < 2, -3, 17 >
e(t, local) = 3 + < 12, -5, 5 >

It’s a pretty straight forward fix. Notice that the absolute values of the integers inside the vectors now only sum up to 22 (corresponding to the sites stretching from “D” to “Y”).

Local Alignment E-String Subprofiles

The bug I faced wasn’t in the above however. It only occurred when I needed to specify subprofiles of local alignments. Imagine having a local alignment of two sequences in memory. Imagine now that there is a specific run of aligned sites therein that you are interested in and want to extract. That specific run should be specifiable by using the original sequences and a corresponding pair of e-strings and pair of offsets. Ideally, the new e-strings and offsets should be derived from the e-strings and offsets we had gathered from performing the original local alignment. We call this specific run of aligned sites a subprofile.

As you will see, this bug is actually a result of forgetting to count the number of gaps needed that occur after the original local alignment offset and before where the new subprofile should start. Don’t worry, this will become clearer with an example.

For the local alignment of s and t, I want to specify a subprofile stretching from the site at letter “I” to the site at letter “V”.

s(local) = DE---IJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY → s(subprofile) = IJKLMNOPQRSTUV
t(local) = DEFGHIJKLMNO-----UVWXY → t(subprofile) = IJKLMNO-----UV

What do you suppose the edit string to derive would be?

Let’s puzzle this out — we want to take a substring from each s and t from position 5 to position 18 of the local alignment as shown below …

Position:       0    0            1  2
                0    5            8  1
     s(local) = DE---IJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY →
s(subprofile) =      IJKLMNOPQRSTUV
                |    |            |  |
     t(local) = DEFGHIJKLMNO-----UVWXY →
t(subprofile) =      IJKLMNO-----UV
                     |            |
                     |<-  Want  ->|

Let’s break this down further and get first the vector part of the e-string and then the offset part of the e-string.

Getting the Vector part of the Edit String

Remember, we’re trying to get an edit string that will operate on the original sequences s, t and return ssubprofile, tsubprofile. Getting the vector part of the estring is straight forward, you literally find all of the sites specified in the subsequence and save them. Since we want positions [5, 18] in the local edit strings, we retrieve the parts of the edit strings which correspond to those sites (we’ll ignore offsets for now). To visualize this site-to-site mapping, let’s decompose our local estrings into something I call unit-estrings — an equivalent estring which only uses positive and negative ones (given as “+” and “-” below in the unit vectors us, ut for s, t respectively).

Position:                                0         0                         1     2
                                         0         5                         8     1
    s(local) =                           D E - - - I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
e(s, vector) = < 2, -3, 17 > -> u(s) = < + + - - - + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + >
e(s, newvec) = < 14 >        <-        <           + + + + + + + + + + + + + +       >
                                                   |<-        want!        ->|
e(t, newvec) = < 7, -5, 2 >  <-        <           + + + + + + + - - - - - + +       >
e(t, vector) = < 12, -5, 5 > -> u(t) = < + + + + + + + + + + + + - - - - - + + + + + >
    t(local) =                           D E F G H I J K L M N O - - - - - U V W X Y

We retrieve as our new vectors es, newvec = < 14 > and et, newvec = < 7, -5, 2 >. Notice that the integer vector elements are just a count of the runs of positive and negative ones in the subprofile region that we want.

Getting the Offset part of the Edit String (the Right way)

This part gets a bit tricky. The offset is a sum of three items.

  1. The offset from the original sequence to the local alignment.
  2. The offset from the local alignment to the subprofile.
  3. The negative of all of the gap characters that are inserted in the local alignment until the start of the subprofile.

The below diagram shows where each of these values come from.

            s =    DEIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
     s(local) =    DE---IJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY -> +0 -- offset from original to local
s(subprofile) =    .....IJKLMNOPQRSTUV    -> +5 -- offset from local to subprofile
                     ---                  -> -3 -- gaps: local start to subprofile start
                                          => +2 == TOTAL
                        |            |
            t = ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOUVWXY
     t(local) = ...DEFGHIJKLMNO-----UVWXY -> +3 -- offset from original to local
t(subprofile) =    .....IJKLMNO-----UV    -> +5 -- offset from local to subprofile
                                          -> -0 -- gaps: local start to subprofile start
                                          => +8 == TOTAL

You might be wondering about the weird gap subtraction for sequence s. This is the solution to my bug! We need this gap subtraction! When you forget to subtract these gaps, you end up with an alignment that is incorrect where the subprofile of s starts too late. But why is this so? When we transform a sequence from the original to the subprofile, the gaps that we’ve taken for granted in the local alignment don’t exist yet. This way, we would be mistakenly pushing our subprofile into a position where non-existent gapped sites are virtually aligned to existing amino acid sites in the alignment partner t. This was a very odd concept for me to grasp, so let yourself think on this for a bit if it still doesn’t make sense. … You could always take it for granted too once I show you below that this is indeed the correct solution 😛

The completed edit strings to specify the subprofile from “I” to “V” for the local alignment of s and t are thus:

e(s, subprofile) = 2 + < 14 >
e(t, subprofile) = 8 + < 7, -5, 2 >

So let’s make sure these work — let’s apply es, subprofile and et, subprofile onto s and t to see if we get back the correct subprofiles.

>>> apply offsets ...

s = DEIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ : +2 remaining ...
s = IJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

t = ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOUVWXY : +8 remaining ...
t = IJKLMNOUVWXY

>>> apply e-strings ...

s = IJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ : < 14 > remaining ...
s = IJKLMNOPQRSTUV

t = IJKLMNOUVWXY : < 7, -5, 2 > remaining ...
t = IJKLMNO : UVWXY : < -5, 2 > remaining ...
t = IJKLMNO----- : UVWXY : < 2 > remaining ...
t = IJKLMNO-----UV

s = IJKLMNOPQRSTUV -- selected subprofile ok.
t = IJKLMNO-----UV -- selected subprofile ok.

The above application results in the desired subprofile.

The SubEString Function in C#

The below source code gives the correct implementation in order to find the e-string corresponding to a subprofile with the following arguments. It is an extension function for List<int> — a natural choice since I am treating lists of integer type as edit strings in my project.

  1. this List<int> u — the local alignment e-string from which to create the subprofile e-string.
  2. int start — the offset from the left specifying the location of the subprofile with respect to the local alignment.
  3. int end_before — the indexed site before which we stop; this is different from length since start and end_before are zero-based and are specified from the very start of the local alignment.
  4. out int lostGaps — returns a negative value to add to the offset — this is the number of gaps that occur between the start of the local alignment and the start of the subprofile.

This function returns a new List<int> e-string as you would expect.

public static List<int> SubEString(
     this List<int> u, int start, int end_before, out int lostGaps) {

    if(end_before < start) {
        Console.Error.WriteLine("Error: end_before < start?! WHY?");
        throw new ValueOutOfRange();
    }

    var retObj = new List<int>();
    var consumed = 0; // the amount "consumed" so far.
    var remaining_start = start; // subtract "remaining_start" to zero.
    var ui = 0; // the current index in the e-string
    var uu = 0; // the current element of the e-string
    var uu_abs = 0; // the absolute value of the current element
    lostGaps = 0; // the number of gaps that is subtracted from the offset.

    //START -- dealing with the "start" argument ...
    for(; ui < u.Count; ui ++) {
        uu = u[ui];
        uu_abs = Math.Abs(uu);
        if(uu_abs < remaining_start) {
            if(uu < 0) lostGaps += uu; //LOSTGAPS
            // add uu this time
            // it's the fraction of remaining_start we care about.
            consumed += uu_abs; // uu smaller than start amount, eat uu.
            remaining_start -= uu_abs; // start shrinks by uu.
            uu_abs = 0; // no uu left.
            uu = 0; // no uu left.
            // not done -- go back and get more uu for me to eat.
        }
        else if(consumed + uu_abs == remaining_start) {
            if(uu < 0) lostGaps += -remaining_start; //LOSTGAPS
            // -- if thus uu is equal to the start amount,
            // count them into LOSTGAPS
            // we want to get everything occurring before the subestring start
            consumed += remaining_start; // same size -- consume start amount.
            uu_abs = 0; // MAD (mutually assured destruction 0 -> 0)
            remaining_start = 0; // MAD
            uu = 0; // MAD
            ui ++; break; // done.
        }
        else if(consumed + uu_abs > remaining_start) {
            if(consumed + uu_abs > end_before && consumed < remaining_start) {
                // easier to say ui == u.Count-1?
                if(uu < 0) lostGaps += -remaining_start; //LOSTGAPS
                uu_abs = (end_before - (consumed + remaining_start));
                uu = uu > 0 ? uu_abs : -uu_abs;
                retObj.Add(uu);
                return retObj;
            } else if(consumed + uu_abs < end_before) {
                consumed += uu_abs;
                // Seemingly wrong -- however:
                // push all the way to the end; subtract the beginning of uu_abs
                // ensures correct calculation of remaining string
                uu_abs -= remaining_start; // remove only start amount.
                // we're getting the end half of uu_abs!
                if(uu < 0) lostGaps += -remaining_start; //LOSTGAPS
                remaining_start = 0; // no start left.
                uu = uu > 0 ? uu_abs : -uu_abs; // remaining uu at this ui.
                if(uu != 0) retObj.Add(uu); // fixes a zero-entry bug
                ui ++; break; // done.
            } else {
                if(uu < 0) lostGaps += -remaining_start; //LOSTGAPS
                uu_abs = (end_before - remaining_start);
                uu = uu > 0 ? uu_abs : -uu_abs;
                retObj.Add(uu);
                return retObj;
            }
        }
    }

    //END_BEFORE -- dealing with the "end_before" argument ...
    for(; ui < u.Count; ui ++) {
        uu = u[ui];
        uu_abs = Math.Abs(uu);
        if((consumed + uu_abs) == end_before) {
            retObj.Add(uu);
            break;
        } else if((consumed + uu_abs) < end_before) {
            retObj.Add(uu);
            consumed += uu_abs;
        } else /*if((consumed + uu_abs) > end_before)*/ {
            uu_abs = end_before - consumed;
            uu = uu > 0 ? uu_abs : -uu_abs;
            retObj.Add(uu);
            break;
        }
    }
    return retObj;
}

I’ve really sent the above code through unit tests and also in practical deployment so it should be relatively bug free. I hope that by posting this here, you can tease out the logic from both the code and the comments and port it to your preferred language. In retrospect, maybe this bug wasn’t so obvious after all. When you think about it, each of the pieces of code and logic are doing exactly what we asked them to. It was only in chaining together an e-string subprofile function along with a local alignment that this thing ever even popped out. Either way, the fix is here. Hopefully it’ll be helpful.

Two Important Notes

  • Since global alignments represent the aligned sites of all sequences involved, no offset is used and hence this bug would never occur when specifying a subprofile of a global alignment.
  • Gaps that occur in the original sequence don’t affect retrieving the subprofile e-string calculation at all because those gaps DO exist and can be authentically counted into an offset.

Next

I haven’t had a need yet for porting the multiply function (earlier post) from global alignment logic to local alignment logic. If there are any insidious logical flaws like the ones I encountered this time, I’ll be sure to make a post.

C# & Bioinformatics: Align Strings to Edit Strings

without comments

This post follows roughly from the e-strings (R. Edgar, 2004) topic that I posted about here. The previous source code was listed in Ruby and JS, but this time I’ve used C#.

In this post, I discuss alignment strings (a-strings), then why and how to convert them into edit strings (e-strings). Incidentally, I can’t seem to recover where I first saw alignment strings so tell me if you know.

Alignment strings

When you perform a pairwise sequence alignment, the transformation that you perform on the two sequences is finite. You can record precisely where insertions, deletions and substitutions (or matches) are made. This is useful if you want to retain the original sequences, or later on build a multiple sequence alignment while keeping the history of modifications. There’s a datastructure I’ve seen described called alignment strings, and in it you basically list out the characters ‘I’, ‘D’ and ‘M’ to describe the pairwise alignment.

Consider the example two protein subsequences below.

gi|115372949: GQAGDIRRLQSFNFQTYFVRHYN
gi|29827656:  SLSTGVSRSFQSVNYPTRYWQ

A global alignment of the two using the BLOSUM62 substitution matrix with the gap penalties -12 to open, -1 to extend yields the following.

gi|115372949: GQAGDIR-----RLQSFNFQTYFVRHYN
gi|29827656:  SL----STGVSRSFQSVNYPT---RYWQ

The corresponding alignment string looks like this…

gi|115372949: GQAGDIR-----RLQSFNFQTYFVRHYN
gi|29827656:  SL----STGVSRSFQSVNYPT---RYWQ
Align String: MMDDDDMIIIIIMMMMMMMMMDDDMMMM

Remember, the alignment is described such that the top string is modelled as occurring earlier than the bottom string which occurs later — this is why a gap in the top string is an insertion (that new material is inserted in the later, bottom string) while a gap in the bottom string is a deletion (that material is deleted to make the later string). Notice in reality, it doesn’t really matter what’s on top and what’s on bottom– the important thing is that the alignment now contains gaps.

Why we should probably use e-strings instead

An alignment string describes the relationship between two strings and their gaps — we are actually recording some redundant information if we only want to take one string at a time into consideration and the path needed to construct profiles it participates in. The top and bottom sequences are also treated differently, where both ‘M’ and ‘D’ indicates retention of the original characters for the top string and both ‘M’ and ‘I’ indicates retention for the bottom string; the remaining character of course implies the inclusion of a gap character. A pair of e-strings would give each of these sequences their own data structure and allow us to cleanly render the sequences as they appear in the deeper nodes of a phylogenetic tree using the multiply operation described last time.

Here are the corresponding e-strings for the above examples.

gi|115372949: GQAGDIR-----RLQSFNFQTYFVRHYN
e-string:     < 7, -5, 16 >
gi|29827656:  SL----STGVSRSFQSVNYPT---RYWQ
e-string:     < 2, -4, 16, -3, 4 >

Recall that an e-string is a list of alternating positive and negative integers; positive integers mean to retain a substring of the given length from the originating sequence, and negative integers mean to place in a gap of the given length.

Converting a-strings to e-strings

Below is a C# code listing for an implementation I used in my project to convert from a-strings to the more versatile e-strings. The thing is — I really don’t use a-strings to begin with anymore. In earlier versions of my project, I used to keep track of my movement across the score matrix using an a-string by dumping down a ‘D’ for a vertical hop, a ‘I’ for a horizontal hop and a ‘M’ for a diagonal hop. I now just count the number of relevant steps to generate the matching pair of e-strings.

The function below, astring_to_estring takes an a-string (string u) as an argument and returns two e-strings in a list (List<List<int>>) — don’t let that type confuse you, it simply breaks down to a list with two elements in it: the e-string for the top sequence (List<int> v), and the e-string for the bottom sequence (List<int> w).

public static List<List<int>> astring_to_estring(string u) {
    /* Defined elsewhere are the constant characters ...
       EDITSUB = 'M';
       EDITINS = 'I';
       EDITDEL = 'D';
    */
    var v = new List<int>(); // Top e-string
    var w = new List<int>(); // Bottom e-string
    foreach(var uu in u) {
        if(uu == EDITSUB) { // If we receive a 'M' ...
            if(v.Count == 0) { // Working with e-string v (top, keep)
                v.Add(1);
            } else if(v[v.Count -1] <= 0) {
                v.Add(1);
            } else {
                v[v.Count -1] += 1;
            }
            if(w.Count == 0) { // Working with e-string w (bottom, gap)
                w.Add(1);
            } else if(w[w.Count -1] <= 0) {
                w.Add(1);
            } else {
                w[w.Count -1] += 1;
            }
        } else if(uu == EDITINS) { // If we receive a 'I' ...
            if(v.Count == 0) { // Working with e-string v (top, gap)
                v.Add(-1);
            } else if(v[v.Count -1] >= 0) {
                v.Add(-1);
            } else {
                v[v.Count -1] -= 1;
            }
            if(w.Count == 0) { // Working with e-string w (bottom, keep)
                w.Add(1);
            } else if(w[w.Count -1] <= 0) {
                w.Add(1);
            } else {
                w[w.Count -1] += 1;
            }
        } else if(uu == EDITDEL) { // If we receive a 'D' ...
            if(v.Count == 0) { // Working with e-string v (top, keep)
                v.Add(1);
            } else if(v[v.Count -1] >= 0) {
                v[v.Count -1] += 1;
            } else {
                v.Add(1);
            }
            if(w.Count == 0) { // Working with e-string w (bottom, keep)
                w.Add(-1);
            } else if(w[w.Count -1] >= 0) {
                w.Add(-1);
            } else {
                w[w.Count -1] -= 1;
            }
        }
    }
    var vw = new List<List<int>>(); // Set up return list ...
    vw.Add(v); // Top e-string v added ...
    vw.Add(w); // Bottom e-string w added ...
    return vw;
}

The conversion back from e-strings to a-strings is also easy, but I don’t cover that today. Enjoy and happy coding 😀

Eddie Ma

August 21st, 2010 at 9:03 pm

Bioinformatics: Edit Strings (Ruby, JavaScript)

without comments

>>> Attached: ( editStringAdder.rb — in Ruby | editStrings.js — in JavaScript ) <<<

I wanted to share something neat that I’ve been using in the phylogeny analyzing software I’ve been developing. In the MUSCLE3 BMC Bioinformatics paper (Robert Edgar, 2004), Edgar describes a way to describe all the changes required to get from one raw sequence to how it appears somewhere in an internal node, riddled with gaps. He calls the data structures Edit Strings (e-strings).

I started using these things in my visualizer because it is a convenient way to describe how to render a profile of sequences at internal nodes of my phylogenetic trees. Rather than storing a copy of the sequence with gaps at each of its ancestors, e-strings allow you to store a discrete pathway of the changes your alignment algorithm made to a sequence at each node.

You can chain e-strings together with a multiply operation so that the profile of any node in the tree can be created out of just the original primary sequences of the dataset (the taxa) and the set of corresponding e-strings for the given tree. You can choose to store the alphabet-distribution profiles this way at each node too, but I decided to use the e-strings only for my visualizer (where seeing each sequence within a profile is important).

Edit strings take the form of a sequence of alternating positive and negative integers; positive integers mean “retain a substring of this length” while negative integers mean “insert gaps of this length” — here’s a few example applications of edit strings on the sequence “ABCDEFGHI“:

<10>("ABCDEFGHIJ") = "ABCDEFGHIJ"
<10 -3>("ABCDEFGHIJ") = "ABCDEFGHIJ---"
<4, -2, 6>("ABCDEFGHIJ") = "ABCD--EFGHIJ"
<2, -1, 5, -4, 3>("ABCDEFGHIJ") = "AB-CDEFG----HIJ"

A few particulars should be mentioned. An application of an e-string onto a sequence is only defined when the sum of the positive integers equals the length of the sequence. The total number of negative integers is arbitrary, and refers to any number of inserted gaps. Finally, a digit zero is meaningless. Edit strings can be multiplied together. If you apply two edit strings in succession onto a sequence, the result is the same as if you had applied the product of two edit strings onto that same sequence. Here are some examples of edit strings multipled together.

<10> * <10> = <10>
<10> * <7, -1, 2> = <7, -1, 2>
<6, -1, 4> * <7, -1, 3, -2, 1> = <6, -2, 3, -2, 1>
<6, -1, 4> * <3, -1, 3, -1, 3, -1, 2> = <3, -1, 3, -2, 2, -1, 2>
<6, -1, 4> * <2, -1, 6, -5, 3> = <2, -1, 4, -1, 1, -5, 3>

The multiply function is a bit tricky to implement at first, but one can work backward from the result to get the intermediate step that’s performed mentally. The last two examples above can manually calculated if we imagine an intermediate step as follows. We convert the first e-string to its application on a sequence of ‘+’ symbols– in both the below cases, this results in ten ‘+’ symbols with one ‘-‘ (gap) inserted after the sixth position. We then apply the second edit string to the result of the first application. Finally, we write out the total changes as an e-string on the original sequence of ten ‘+’ symbols. Don’t worry, we don’t really do this in real life software — it’s just a good way for human brains to comprehend the overall operation.

Second last example above — expanded out…

<6, -1, 4> * <3, -1, 3, -1, 3, -1, 2> = ...
++++++-++++ * <3, -1, 3, -1, 3, -1, 2> = ...
+++-+++--++-++ = <3, -1, 3, -2, 2, -1, 2>

Last example above — expanded out…

<6, -1, 4> * <2, -1, 6, -5, 3> = ...
++++++-++++ * <2, -1, 6, -5, 3> = ...
++-++++-+-----+++ = <2, -1, 4, -1, 1, -5, 3>

Here’s the code in Ruby for my take on the multiply function. I derived my version of the function based on the examples from Edgar’s BMC paper (mentioned before). When you think about it, the runtime is the sum of the number of elements of the two e-strings being multiplied. This becomes obvious when you realize that the only computation that really occurs is when a positive integer is encountered in the second e-string. The function is called estring_product(), it takes two e-strings as arguments (u, v) and returns a single e-string (w). This function internally calls an estring_collapse() function because we intermediately create an e-string that may have several positive integers or several negative integers in a row (when this happens, it’s usually just two in a row). Consecutive same-signed integers of an e-string are added together.

def estring_product(u, v)
    w = []
    uu_replacement = nil
    ui = 0
    vi = 0
    v.each do |vv|
        if vv < 0
            w << vv
        elsif vv > 0
            vv_left = vv
            uu = uu_replacement != nil ? uu_replacement : u[ui]
            uu_replacement = nil
            until vv_left == 0
                if vv_left >= uu.abs
                    w << uu
                    vv_left -= uu.abs
                    ui += 1
                    uu = u[ui]
                else
                    if uu > 0
                        w << vv_left
                        uu -= vv_left
                    elsif uu < 0
                        w << -vv_left
                        uu += vv_left
                    end
                    vv_left = 0
                    uu_replacement = uu
                end
            end
        end
        vi += 1
    end
    return estring_collapse(w)
end

If you aren’t familiar with Ruby, the “<<” operator means “append the right value to the left collection”. Everything else should be pretty self-explanatory (leave a comment if it’s not).

def estring_collapse(u)
    v = []
    u.each do |uu|
        if v[-1] == nil
            v << uu
        elsif (v[-1] <=> 0) == (uu <=> 0)
            v[-1] += uu
        else
            v << uu
        end
    end
    return v
end

The “<=>” lovingly referred to as the spaceship operator compares the right value to the left value; if the right value is greater, then the result is 1.0; if the left value is greater, then the result is -1.0; if the left and right values are the same, then the result is 0.0.

A Few Notes on the Attached Files (Ruby, Javascript)

The Ruby source has a lot of comments in it that should help you understand when and where to use the included two functions. The Javascript is actually used in a visualizer I’ve deployed now so it has a few more practical functions in it. A function called sequence_estring() is included that takes a $sequence and applies an $estring, then returns a new gapped sequence. A utility signum() function is included which takes the place of the spaceship operator in the Ruby version. A diagnostic function, p_uvw() is included that just uses document.write() to print out whatever you give as (estring) $u, (estring) $v and (estring) $w. Finally, the JavaScript functions sequence_estring() and estring_product() will print out error messages with document.write() when the total sequence length specified in the first argument is not the same as the total sequence length implied by the second argument. Remember, the sum of the absolute values of the first argument describes the total length of the sequence– each of these tokens must be accounted for by the positive values of the second argument, the estring that will operate on it.