It's not a dumb question at all, and I ran in to the same problem once. I was splitting HTML text and pulled my hair out for a while trying to figure out why it wasn't putting the slurped text in to an array using @text=split(/\n/, $slurp;

The problem seems to stem from the differences between Unix and Windows ( and possibly the Mac too, I'm not sure ) and how they write newlines to a file.

I solved the problem by splitting on \r or \r\n or \n, depending on how the newlines were written in the file.

Hope that helps!

There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling now.