The download is in the form of a .ace file suitable for use with AceDB. It is also fairly easy to translate into another format with a scripting tool such as Python, awk, or perl.
Lines beginning with // are a comment, and are treated as if they were not there.
The file is a sequence of records separated by blank lines. The line that begins "Pfam : " is the start of a record. The quoted text after the colon is the name of the motif.
The rest of the record is a set of field names. The field names are either "Product" if you downloaded the list of products (i.e. proteins) or "Gene" if you downloaded the list of genes.
For example, this
is two pfam records. The motif named "Argk" was found in the
gene named "2H390", and the motif named "ARID" was found in
the four genes listed.
PFam : "ArgK"
Gene "2H390"
PFam : "ARID"
Gene "1F870"
Gene "2I314"
Gene "4L691"
Gene "cfi-1"
In AceDB format, a backslash inside the quoted string indicates that the next character is used as-is, instead of it's usual meaning. In practice, "\x" means "x". The one special case is "\n" which means a newline. You are not likely to find this type of escape used in the Pfam output.