in reply to merge sequences with new sequence insertion

Read all lines into an array, grep the contigs, and then join them:

use strict; use warnings; my @data = grep { !/^(>|\s)/ } <DATA>; chomp @data; print join "nnnnncattccattcattaattaattaatgaatgaatgnnnnn", @data; __DATA__ >contig number 11 tttgctcggaggggatc >contig number 23 gaaaacacttccttattatacaggtaaaccgtatttggat >contig number 3 aaagctcggaggggatcccct

or a one liner using regexes:

perl -e "undef $/; print join 'nnnnncattccattcattaattaattaatgaatgaatg +nnnnn', <> =~ /^([tcag]+)$/gm;" input_file.txt >output_file.txt