a fast method of reading data from PDB files

This file is a blazingly fast method of reading PDB files

Description

This is the fastest way I know to read in a PDB. Strings are conveniently stored as cell variables, and numbers are stored as matrices. Unfortunately there is no faster way that I am aware of to convert text to numbers, so there is an upper limit in matlab for reading a PDB.

To speed up the program, comment out any lines for data not being used. Removing one line that outputs numeric data speeds the program up by roughly 7-8%.

example usage : this plots the atoms of 3IJU.pdb

atoms = fastPDBRead('3IJU.pdb')
plot3(atoms.X, atoms.Y, atoms.Z, '.');

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.10 (2010a)