in reply to why is my regex not right?

Just grab all the prices into an array, then use the ones you want:
use warnings; use strict; use Data::Dumper; while (<DATA>) { my $line = $_; my @prices = $line =~ m[(\$\d?,?\d\d\d\.\d\d\b)]g; print Dumper(\@prices); } __DATA__ "18-December-09";"$1,104.50 ";"29-July-97";"$326.55 ";"25-April-85";"$ +322.50 "
Prints:
$VAR1 = [ '$1,104.50', '$326.55', '$322.50' ];
See Global matching