Getting sequence descriptions into BLAST output

[kmcarr]

The xml file has this information under hit_def, but how can I get this into the tab-delimited output?

Short answer: you can't.

The hit-def is simply not one of the available fields to display for any of the tabular formats. If you want to include the definition in a tabular style report you will have to output a full report from blast (e.g. as text or XML) and then parse that report yourself to produce the table you want.

[Hilary]

I am blasting a transcriptome dataset against some vertebrate unigene sets using standalone BLAST+. I want my output in a tab-delimited file so have been using outfmt 6 or 7. However, this only returns the ID (or accession or GI) of the hit - ie something like this: gnl|UG|Gga#S19183375, but what I would really like to have is the description of what this gene actually is - for the entry above it is "Gallus gallus breast cancer 2, early onset (BRCA2), mRNA" (ie the Sequence Definition line in Genbank format).

The xml file has this information under hit_def, but how can I get this into the tab-delimited output?