You aren't splitting on the right character and you should use a third argument to split if you want to preserve any of the trailing empty fields.

perl -le '$_="2|3|||||"; @a = split /\|/; print scalar @a
2
[download]

The reason that @a only has two elements is explained in the first paragraph of perldoc -f split:

     split   Splits a string into a list of strings and returns
             that list.  By default, empty leading fields are
             preserved, and empty trailing ones are deleted.
[download]

If you know that the line you are splitting will have 7 elements, you can preserve them like this:

perl -le '$_="2|3|||||"; @a = split /\|/, $_, 7; print scalar @a'
7
[download]

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

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