First of all: Use perlfunc:chomp on your input to get rid of the trailing newline. On the other hand, that shouldn't be the problem you currently have.

It seems to me that you might have the space in the file you read, with a quick lookthrough I don't see the problem in the code (or, I might just be distracted ;). I personally would use the following for asigning the txt1 and txt2:

my $textr1 = $ref->{'txt1'};
my $textr2 = $ref->{'txt2'};
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No need to put the whole ref in quotes, and I think it's cleaner if you put the key in quotes.
--
Alfie