Well, heck, if we're going to go down the road of confusing the person, we can make each individual line an array ref of elements split on predetermined separators :)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

$_ = [ grep {$_} split /[\s,:]/ ] for my @data = <DATA>;
print Dumper \@data;

__DATA__
foo bar, baz
this    that: those
[download]

Note: that was tongue-in-cheek, but I can see that point that Abigail-II made.

Cheers,
Ovid

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