To explain further, what's happening is that '|' is a special character. Because the regex (the stuff in //) has nothing to match on (the special character not actually meaning anything), it matches on the empty string. As there is an empty string between every single character in a string, what you just did was equivalent to split //, $myline;

Using your previous code, I would be willing to bet that:

$ip == '1'
$appid == '9'
$apppath == '2'
$extra == '.'
[download]

The rest of the line got discarded.

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Vote paco for President!