QRegExp match certain letters?

Question

I'm working with DNA, RNA and protein sequences and QRegExp doesn't work for me to detect if the sequence contains only certain characters. For example unambiguous contains only acgt :

seq.contains(QRegExp("[gatc]"))

Doesn't work for me. How can I correct that ?

Answer 1

You're looking for whether the sequence contains characters other than gatc. You also shouldn't be using the deprecated QRegExp in Qt 5. So:

#if (QT_VERSION >= QT_VERSION_CHECK(5,0,0))
QRegularExpression invalid("[^gatcGATC]");
#else
QRegExp invalid("[^gatcGATC]");
#endif

if (seq.contains(invalid)) {
  qDebug() << "invalid sequence!";
  ...
}