Belgarion,

Thanks for your input. As I said I am pretty a green Perl man. I am not familiar with how to decide how many bytes converts into a given number of charaters so I would just assume stay away from that.

As for the input file, the textual begining of the file and the start of the DNA should be the same due to the editcontig sub or which ever of the new methods you guys suggested eating the numbers and the white space.

Thanks again, for your time I can tell this is where i need to ask questions from now on. The other boards i frequent are not 1/8 as helpful as you guys.

-Augustine