Start by making your post here readable: Markup in the Monastery

Also start to read the fine documentation, it tells you quite a bit about using perl: perlintro

When you encounter specific problems, feel free to ask them here.

i kno very last min!

But seriously, some more things you will have to look into:

• How are the fields in the .txt file separated from each other? If they are comma or tab-separated, Text::CSV can be of great help.
• How to read a .fasta file? Various modules exist for that: for example FASTAParse, Bio::FASTASequence and Bio::FASTASequence::File

As noted by previous posters you'll want to read more than expect answers, like perlintro.

Chances are your solution will have the following form:

Open file
While the file has lines, read a line of text. 
  {
    Split the line of text into useful pieces.
    Save each corresponding field into your desired data structure (in
+ this case, a hash).
  } 

print data (perhaps in another loop foreach of your keys)
[download]

You may then attempt to print each line, perhaps after ordering the keys, etc. The cool thing is you've got a lot of flexibility, and Perl makes it easy to make quick changes and see the results immediately.

Start simple, and then tweak it. In a few hours, I think you'll be surprised at all the fun you're having.

Good luck, and next time don't put it off til the last second--because you're really short-changing yourself hours of sheer joy and programming ecstasy that comes with using Perl. (I can understand if you had some ball-n-chain language (like Ruby, C# or Java) you had to deal with why you'd want to put it off til the last second... but not Perl!) Best regards,

--Ray

Please see:

• Not Exactly a Hash Tutorial
• How can I visualize my complex data structure?