How can I change a Sequence’s name?

Mostly BioJava Sequence objects are immutable. This is really a safety feature to prevent changes corrupting the integrity of the data. A consequence of this is that there is no setName() method in Sequence. One way to change your “view” of a Sequence is to make a ViewSequence using the original Sequence as an argument in the constructor. Behind the scenes the ViewSequence wrapper intercepts some of the method calls to the underlying Sequence which gives the possibility of changing the name.

The following program demonstrates this.

```java import java.io.*;

import org.biojava.bio.seq.*; import org.biojava.bio.seq.io.*; import org.biojava.bio.symbol.*;

public class NameChange {

 public static void main(String[] args) {
   try {
     Sequence seq =
         DNATools.createDNASequence("atgcgctaggctag","gi|12356|ABC123");

     //create a veiw on the sequence and change its name
     Sequence view = SequenceTools.view(seq, "ABC123");

     //print to FASTA to prove the name has changed
     SeqIOTools.writeFasta(System.out, view);
   }
   catch (IllegalSymbolException ex) {
     //tried to make seq with non DNA symbol
     ex.printStackTrace();
   }catch (IOException ex) {
     //couldn't print view to System out??
     ex.printStackTrace();
   }
 }

} ```