The question I guess is how to make a $string break and separate everything and place each word or pharse into an array. You'd need to use a foreach but I can't seem to figure out how to set it up. If someone can help with this, I could do the rest.

Well, you already know you can use a foreach. Taking a look at perlsyn, we see that foreach expects a LIST; conveniently enough, that is exactly what is returned by split:

foreach my $word ( split /,\s*/, $string )
{
    # do stuff with $word here
}
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Hope that wasn't too much of a spoiler! Remeber: LISTs are syntactic constructions (things that show up in program syntax); arrays are things that exist in memory. You can assign into an array from a LIST, and you can feed arrays into things that expect LISTs. But the two are, in fact, different things.