The following is recipe 8.1 "Reading Lines with Continuation Characters" from The Perl Cookbook.
(Well worth the money btw.) Tom and Nate, I hope you don't mind...

while (defined($line = <FH>) ) {
  chomp $line;
  if ($line =~ s/\\$//) {
    $line .= <FH>;
    redo unless eof(FH);
  }
  # process full record in $line here
}
[download]

Perhaps you could modify it to suit your needs.