You may find supersplit useful as well. It does split/join at multiple levels, so uses multi-dimensional arrays. For example

open FILE, "data.txt"
$array=supersplit('|', \*FILE );
[download]

Would result in one array containing all lines as rows and the separate items as columns. The first item for example, can be accessed by $array->[0][0]. See POD of the script for more examples and doc.

Jeroen
I was dreaming of guitarnotes that would irritate an executive kind of guy (FZ)