I am starting my first real programming project in fasm, but I still need a little bit of help with some of the basics. The program I will be building will take a .txt file and encrypt it with a passphrase/key/protocol combination. To decrypt it, one must run the .txt through the same program with the same combination.

There are two things I need to know how to do to complete this project, which I do not know how to do in FASM: read from a .txt, write to a .txt, and parse a string (loaded from the .txt).

Use API functions:
to read from any file - CreateFile..ReadFile..CloseHandle..
to write a file - CreateFile..WriteFile..CloseHandle

To parse a string you must write your own procedure.

How would I go about using the API functions (what syntax).

Is it like this?:

CreateFile filename
ReadFile [information_in_file_goes_here],filename
CloseHandle filename

you need windows api documentation. Look for "winapi" or "win32api" help file (.chm or .hlp), you should find some.

Check here: http://flatassembler.net/docs.php
At the bottom of the page you will find exactly what you need.

Regards.

Ahh, so that's what that is!

*slaps self repeatedly for not scrolling down before*