Why you donīt just leave the quoting signs out of your .dat file, if it is possible. and put something else in between as a delimeter, something like ":" or a tab... then you could do a split on your delimeter sign, which is used in the .dat file for example you use the ":" as delimeter your split will lokk like this my($first_name,$last_name,$address,$city,$state,$phone)=split(/:/);