This looks very much like a "Character Separated Values" file (CSV). This is a very common file format (Excel spread sheets for example) and Perl has great tools for dealing with CSV file. Take a look at Text::CSV and see if that makes your life easier.

If you are thinking of moving the data into a database you may also find DBD::CSV a useful tool. DBD::CSV allows you to access a CSV file using DBI to give a SQL database interface to the file.