Basically the program takes a file with a series of plain alphanumerics seperated by new lines and then translates it into this binary format.

Um, which program is it that does this? (Does it matter?)

i need to figure out how to translate to, and back from, the binary format

Do you mean you need to reverse-engineer whatever program it is that you're talking about?

Alas, it seems that the link to the binary data does not work as intended -- I get a blank page, and "view page source" also yields a blank page.

How about starting with a simple octal or hex dump of the file? The unix "od" command is probably best for this, since it gives you the flexibility of treating binary data as bytes, 16-bit words, etc. But of course, you want to know how to do it in Perl, so start with this quick-and-dirty method for a hex dump of byte codes:

$/=undef;
open(I,"your_binary.file");
$d=<I>;
$o=join("\n",map{sprintf("%x",ord)} split(//,$d))."\n";
print $o;
[download]

Using unpack is fun too, but you really want to try that out for yourself -- experimentation is the best teacher...

update: removed pointless, stupid remark