Yes, I really think that Perl would be good at that. Reading flat text data files is probably at least 50% of my activity, and not only I am convinced that Perl is really really good at that, but I have succeeded in a quite short period to convince all of my colleagues to switch to Perl for this type of data manipulation. Because they saw that I could develop things in about one third of the time they needed with other technologies, because they saw that I got less anomalies than they did, because they saw that my programs had good performances, and also because when they tried, they also got better results, even as beginners in the language.