What are you trying to do? I don't understand why you're messing with the input record separator ($/).

With a |-delimited file, something like this works:

while(<>) {
  chomp;
  my @array = split(/\|/);
}
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and who cares if any of the elements in @array have \r?

If you're looking to strip \r out of your text, it's just what you'd think it would be:

  s/\r//g;
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(Welcome to perlmonks!)

Update Ah, I see. Ack! I hate dealing with sloppy data :)