title: Pandas specify line format
body: <p>I want to use <code>pandas</code> to read <a href="http://service.scedc.caltech.edu/ftp/catalogs/SCSN/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">earthquake catalogues</a> provided by SCEDC. Probably for historical reasons, the file format is rather obscure, as detailed in the <code>README</code>:</p>
  
  <pre><code>col len format name comment
  --- --- ------ ---- -------
   1   4    a4   year YYYY
   6   2    a2   mon  MM
   9   2    a2   day  DD
  13   2    a2   hour HH  (UTC time:
  16   2    a2   min  mm   7 hours ahead of Pacific Daylight Time
  19   5   f5.2  sec  SS.ss    8 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time)
      25   3    i3   lat  degrees 
      29   5   f5.2  lat      minutes 
      34   4    i4   lon  degrees  
      39   5   f5.2  lon  minutes
  45   1    a1   quality  location quality
                  'A'  +- 1 km horizontal distance
                       +- 2 km depth
                  'B'  +- 2 km horizontal distance
                       +- 5 km depth
                  'C'  +- 5 km horizontal distance
                       no depth restriction
                  'D'  &gt;+- 5 km horizontal distance
                  'Z'  no quality listed in database
  47   3   f3.1  magnitude
  54   6   f6.2  depth    kilometers
  60   3    i3   nph  number of picked phases
  67   5   f5.2  rms  root mean square of travel times
  73   8    i8   eventid  event ID
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which amounts to this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>#YYY MM DD  HH mm SS.ss  LATITUDE LONGITUDE Q MAG     DEPTH NPH    RMS   EVID
  2008 01 01  02 37 08.85  33 35.95-116 43.56 A 0.7     13.16 41     0.16 10297549
  2008 01 01  05 12 06.46  33 37.12-116 39.90 A 0.8     13.03 48     0.23 10297553
  2008 01 02  18 31 42.73  34 50.89-118 45.92 C 1.1     -1.28 11     0.28 10297805
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>While I don't mind the space-delimited format, things are getting nasty in the <code>LATITUDE</code> and <code>LONGITUDE</code> columns: each coordinate component is given in <code>[degrees] [minutes]</code> format (e.g. <code>33 35.95</code> and <code>-116 43.56</code> for the first earthquake), but there is no space between the latitude minutes and longitude degrees (<code>33 35.95-116 43.56</code>), which makes it hard to split the line properly.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to provide that obscure (<code>a4 a2 f5.2 i3</code> etc.) format to <code>pandas.read_csv</code> to specify how to split and interpret each line in the catalogue?</p>