First of all, local doesn't do what you'd expect. Change the local to my and you'll be ok. See local and my for the details.

You're inadvertently just splitting the input line on a space and putting the elements in an array. What you need to do is split the value of $1 (which is the string matched by the (\w+) part when you find a line that matches. So that part could be rewritten as 

if (/^-- NAME:\s(.+)/) {
    @name = split(" ", $1);
}
if (/^-- TOYS:\s(.+)/) {
    @toys = split(" ", $1);
}

[download]
I'm assuming that after "NAME" there can also be multiple names.

Arjen

In reply to Re: array issue by Aragorn
in thread array issue by Anonymous Monk

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