This article is now archived.
WDL articles now live in the openwdl/wdl-docs GitHub repository. Find the updated documentation on the wdl-docs website.
This WDL function allows you to name an output file based on another filename, e.g. an input filename. Giving it a File will strip off the path and yield the filename alone (as a String). If you also give it a string as a secondary argument, the function will attempt to strip that string off the end of the filename and return whatever remains.
This is super convenient for stripping off a file extension and replacing it with something else, when you want to e.g. name a task's output file based on an input filename.
Basic usage:
File input_file = "/Users/chris/input.bam" String base = basename(input_file)
This produces input.bam.
Providing a suffix string:
File input_file = "/Users/chris/input.bam" String stripped = basename(input_file, ".bam")
This produces input, which can then be combined with a new suffix string to produce the desired output filename.
