This represents a tag value from a bam record This should be to the bam specification. It stores only a pointer to the tag and from there can be parsed into any of the tag types but only if the tag matches that type. c byte C ubyte s short S ushort i int I uint f float Bc array of type byte Z char array H hex?
See https://samtools.github.io/hts-specs/SAMv1.pdf sec 1.5