Had a labmate come by and ask for help with TCGA Level 3 expression data. Its distributed as one file per sample, which when you have several HUNDRED specimens, isn't really the kind of thing you can or want to re-format by hand if you want to make comparisons across samples.
"How Hard Can it Be?!" I said. Oh when will I learn...
Two days and several infinite loops later, I present two dainty perl scripts for:
a) Take n many sample files and corral them into one flat file, probes x samples. (TCGA Merge)
b) Take a tab delimited text file with x probes and y samples and turn it into a GenePattern-friendly .gct file. (RXC to GCT)
Comes with no warranty, yadda, yadda. Would love to know if this is useful for anyone else, and remember, WATCH YOUR LINE ENDINGS!