Re-reading your question, I think your problem might be a little different than I thought at first. The problem you are running into is that the escaped line ending is ruining your day because you are reading line by line through the file.

There are a couple ways to handle that. One is to check if the line ends with a backwhack and a newline and then to remove those characters and append the next line before continuing your processing. Another is to read the whole file into a single variable and remove the escaped line endings all at once with something like $file =~ s/\\\n//gs;.

Any way you do it is going to require caution though. Unless you are prepared to build a real parser for your input, you might run into problems.

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