The simplest way to get or format the result for a given RID is to use the following URL, which uses the default format parameters:
http://www.ncbi.nlm/nih.gov/blast/Blast.cgi?\
RID=6ZXJ7X1P014&CMD=Get'
If the search is completed and the result is ready, the output will contain the formatted result with "Status=READY" contained in comment lines as given in the example.
QBlastInfoEnd
->
The comment lines are followed by the actual BLAST result in the specified format. One can include additional parameters in the formatting URL to get different formatting options as given in the following example.
$ lynx -source '\
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=6ZXJ7X1P014\
&FORMAT_OBJECT=Alignment&ALIGNMENT_TYPE=Pairwise&FORMAT_TYPE=HTML\
&DESCRIPTIONS=10&ALIGNMENTS=5&SHOW_OVERVIEW=yes"
This is interpreted as 'get results for RID 6ZXJ7X1P014', 'format the alignment to show it in Pairwise format', 'produce HTML output', 'display at most 10 descriptions and 5 alignments', and 'show the graphical overview'. For more details, refer to the 'Commands' (4) and 'Parameters' (5) sections below, where individual parameters and accepted value(s) are discussed. If the BLAST search is not yet complete, the interim output returned will contain 'Status=WAITING' as show in the example below:
QBlastInfoEnd
->
If your search result has the status of 'WAITING', it is advisable to wait for at least one minute before trying the retrieval again. Other possible values for the status are ERROR, FAILED, UNKNOWN, or empty. Under certain circumstances, one may see other non-QBlAst types of errors or warnings due to errors from web front-end machines, mistakes in construction of the 'Get' URL, or problems encountered during the actual search. Scripts performing automated searches should handle these situations to avoid unecessary pollings for results that do not exist (8.2).