You could do an inplace edit s/'/"/ if $^O =~ m/MSWin32/ Backups made to file.bak

perl -pi.bak -e 'tr/^/:/' file list here
[download]

But from what you write rather than bother to convert ^ to : if the actual need is to split on ^ OR : chars you should note that the first arg to split is really an RE so:

split /[\^:]/, $data
[download]