The newline character is determined by the sending system. On Win/DOS thats \n\r, on *nix its \n and Mac <= OS 9 I believe is \r\n but don't quote me on that (OS X is \n like all Unixes)

As for your problem: the textarea is going to be returned as a single string that contains newlines so chomp() would only get rid of the last one anyway. If you want the string as an array this should work:

my $textarea = $q->param('textarea');
my $textarea =~ s/\r//g;  # get rid of any \r characters
my @array = split(/\n/,$textarea);
[download]

Hope that helps