How about something along the lines of:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Data::Dumper;

while (<DATA>) {

  my $i=0;

  for $c (/./g) {

    push (@{$array[$i++]}, $c);
  }
}

print Dumper(\@array);

__DATA__
ABC
DBC
ECC
[download]

--
Steve Marvell