Note: split /\n/ is only an acceptable of splitting text into lines if you don't care about eliminating trailing blank lines.

You can perhaps get around that by supplying a third argument to split of -1. The method does point up a non-existant empty line at the end of the file but that can be coped with by spliting to an array and poping if necessary.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $str   = qq{this\nis my short\nstring\n\n};
my $count = 0;

for ( split m{\n}, $str, -1 )
{
    print ++ $count, qq{: $_\n};
}
[download]

Produces

1: this
2: is my short
3: string
4: 
5:
[download]

I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG