I'm kind of lost right now as to how to attack it. I am unfamiliar with the way in which perl opens a text file and how I can search it to pull out the necessary values.

Have you seen the online book Beginning Perl? In particular, chapter 6 will probably answer your questions about files. As for pulling out data: I'm not entirely clear on exactly what you want to do, but do take a look at chapter 5 on regular expressions.

And there are sites and mailing lists dedicated to complete newbies, do take a look at http://learn.perl.org.