Grandfather's approach to your problem is more direct than this. Starting from your post's title, I anticipated a different question: cleaning data which should have newlines in it, e.g. address is one field directly printable.

I doubt I have the same trailing trash on my line-ends as you do.

Be well,
rir

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my $separator = '|';

my $input = "";

while (<DATA>) {
    $input .= $_;
    if ($input =~ m/
            ^                 # start of string
            (                 # group 1 is
                (?:              # group 2 not memo'd is
                    [^|]*\|         # any # not-pipe then a pipe
                 ) {26}          # repeated 26 times total
                 $               # and reaching the end of string
            )
            /sx    # while matching \n with .
        )
    {

        my $record = $1;
        $input =~ s/^\Q$record\E\n//s;  # trailing trash??

        my @arr = split /\|/, $record;
        # process @arr
    }
}

__DATA__
EN|486822|||KKJSKA|L|L00219796|STR, JASON A|JASON|A|STR|||||3710 |NORT
+H CANTON|OH|44720|||000|0003053964|I|||
EN|486823|||YYYYYY|L|L00738657|OCID, SEAN M|SEAN|M|OCID|||||3846 Foxta
+il Lane

|CINCINNATI|OH|45248|||000|0009544289|I|||
EN|486824|||KXXXXP|L||DSBS, ANDREW J|ANDREW|J|DSBS|||||28835 STILXXXXX
+X|FARXXXXX HILLS|MI|48334|||000||I|||
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