Introduction and General Structure

What you need to know

I assume that you know python.

You can use chemcoord without knowing Pandas, but it gives you a great advantage. If you invest 1h for their tutorial you will greatly increase your productivity in scientific data analysis.

It also helps to know about numpy.

Internal representation of Data

This module uses pandas DataFrames to represent cartesian and internal coordinates. (I will refer to them in lab slang as xyz and zmat)

The xyz_frame has at least four columns ['atom', 'x', 'y', 'z'].

The zmat_frame has at least seven columns ['atom', 'bond_with', 'bond', 'angle_with', 'angle', 'dihedral_with', 'dihedral'].

Since they are normal pandas DataFrames you can do everything with them as long as you respect this structure. This means it is possible to append e.g. a column for the masses of each atom. Besides you can use all the capabilities of pandas.

If you want for example to get only the oxygen atoms of a xyz_frame you can use boolean slicing:

xyz_frame[xyz_frame['atom'] == 'O']

Main classes of this module

The “working horses” of this module are the Cartesian and the Zmat class. The have the methods to operate on their coordinates.

An methods of an instance of the Cartesian class usually return new instances of Cartesian. Besides all methods are sideeffect free unless otherwise stated.

Let’s assume you have a molecule1 and you want to cut a sphere around the origin which gives you molecule2:

molecule2 = molecule1.cutsphere()

If you try this, you will see that:

• molecule2 is a Cartesian instance.
• molecule1 remains unchanged.