Hi all,

Does anybody know if there is a restriction for a read name length (say up to 10k characters)? Have you ever experienced that any software (like samtools, bwa, STAR, etc) complains about long read names?

Thanks
in htslib / sam.h https://github.com/samtools/htslib/blob/develop/htslib/sam.h

the read name is coded by 

    /* @field  l_qname length of the query name */
     uint8_t l_qname;

which is an unsigned byte. So the read name shouldn't be longer than 2^8=256.

it's even shorter in the read-sam method:

https://github.com/samtools/htslib/blob/f2150106bafda80ccd97970637091bb2799bc426/sam.c#L1305
    
     _parse_err(p - q > 252, "query name too long");

