well, i guess you could make a small subroutine that returns an 11-line block out of the file. not taking into account any bad records, here's some pretty straight-forward code:

sub returnrec {
   my ($i,$record);
   for ($i = 0; $i < 11; $i++) {
      $record .= <FILEHANDLE>;
   }
   return $record;
}
[download]

then you can say something like:

my @elements = split /\;/, returnrec();
[download]

--twerq