Without the benefit of your code, I can't really tell you where you went wrong.

use strict;
my $file;
{
  local $/;
  $file = <>;
}
$file =~ s!$/!!g;
my @elements = split /\|/, $file;
[download]

above code is untested

Update
By the way, there is more info about split in the library. I just noticed this was your first post, and that no one pointed you there, so I thought I would mention it as a reference.