in reply to creating a matrix like format

It seems you want to keep the original ordering of the genes, so storing the data in a hash won't help much.

I stored the data in an array instead:

#!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; use feature qw{ say }; use List::Util qw{ uniq }; my @genes; while (<>) { my ($id, $type, $value) = (split)[ 0, 3, 4 ]; push @genes, [ $id, $type, $value ]; } my @types = sort +uniq(map $_->[1], @genes); say join "\t", 'Gene', @types; for my $gene (@genes) { say join "\t", $gene->[0], map $_ eq $gene->[1] ? $gene->[2] : q() +, @types; }

($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord }map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,