Problem opening RFAM database file

[Ohadt]

Hello,
when I open the file "alignments_and_trees.txt" which I downloaded from:

ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/Rf...d_trees.txt.gz

it is totally gibberish.

Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance.

[GenoMax]

That is because the files included in the "database" directory are dumps of a MySQL database. See the README file here: ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/Rfam/11.0/README

Dumps of the relational MySQL database used at the Sanger are also
available, although documentation for this set of files is almost
non-existent.

[maubp]

Also, the file alignments_and_trees.txt.gz has been compressed as indicated by the .gz extension (using the tool gzip, similar to zip files on Windows). If you decompress this you should get a plain text file alignments_and_trees.txt (which will at least not be gibberish )

[GenoMax]

Unfortunately that is not the case. In spite of the .txt extension that file it is still binary after uncompressing (unless the file on the FTP site is corrupt).

[maubp]

Weird. That is... unhelpful, and not following naming conventions

[GenoMax]

After looking at a random selection of files in the ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/Rf...atabase_files/ directory I have a feeling that alignments_and_trees.txt.gz may be corrupt. Other files I tried were indeed plain text after unzipping.