#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use warnings; use diagnostics; use Data::Dumper; my $filename = "dna.txt"; open(my $fh, "<", $filename) || die "could not open $filename: $!\n"; my %bases; my $cnt_errors = 0; while (<$fh>) { # strip spaces s/\s+//ig; # collect results my @results = ($_ =~ /[ACGT]/ig); map { $bases{$_}++ } @results; $cnt_errors += ( length($_) - scalar @results ); } print Dumper(%bases); print "Errors: $cnt_errors\n";