First off, thank you pc88. That does finally get the hash to fill out where it admits not empty, but for some reason I can't pull up any values. The very first line in the text file is 'a' and the line
print "$hashlist{a}\n";
which should display 1, simply prints a newline character as if it couldn't find the key named a
EDIT* - i assigned the %hashlist to an @array, and when I print the first couple $array it displays completely unexpected values, is there a limit to the size of a default hash that I could be overflowing it (109,000) entries in the text file
p.s.
that makes perfect sense about the way i had chomp assigned, that's what I get for using VB for so long.