You should also be able to turn off what perl considers a newline by setting

$/ = undef;
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Now you can

 
$string = <FILE>;  #since $/ is off, everything
                   #gets slurped into $string

@array = split /%%%%\n/m, $string;  #now we just split on 
                       #the appropriate delimiter, carriage
                       #return included
[download]