There is a package by Dana Jacobsen that is very useful for these kind of things. I use it very often. It's not under maintenance though. You can find it here.

If you want to write it yourself, you have to write a real parser. Try Parse::RecDescent. If it's always in the newline format as you posted it, try to split on /\s*,\s*\n/.

Cheers,

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)