from horizon text format into vertical text format

[Hein van den Heuvel]

This is probably lost but just in case a future reader gets this far...

An other way to deal with these suffixes representing multipliers is a table lookup.
This avoids (nested) ifs.
To deal with a missing multiplier append a special characted (or use the newline if there ;-)

Something along the lines of

%mul=qw(x 1 k 1000 m 1000 g 1000000000);

$_ = $text . q(x); # append an 'x' just in case.
m/([0-9.]+)(.)/; # find numbers and multiplier
$value = $1 * $ mul{lc($2)} # and the real value is...

Here is a one-liner if you want to try this

# perl -le %mul=qw(x 1 k 10 m 100 g 1000); while(<>) { chomp; $_.=q(x); m/([0-9.]+)(.)/; print $1*$
mul{$2};}'

fwiw,
Hein.