I have somewhat of a dilemma here. If I read in the following file... named basicdez.dat 
"Jane""Doe" "123 W Beverly Ave" "Talahasee""Maine" "222-22-2222"
"EOS"

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with the following perl logic... 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

my $i;
my $data;
open(DATA," basicdez.dat") || die "Cannot open datfile: $!\n";
while(<DATA>){
   chomp;
   unless ($_=~ /"EOS"/){
      $data .= "$_";
   } elsif ($i ne 1) {
      $data .="\n";
   }
   if ($_=~ /"EOS"/){
      $i=1;
   }
}
close(DATA);

my @data=split(/\n/, $data);
for(@data){
   my($first_name,$last_name,$address,$city,$state,$phone)=split;

   print "$first_name,$last_name\n";
   print "$address\n";
   print "$city, $state\n";
   print "$phone \n";
   }
exit;

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What I would expect would be something as follows... 
Jane, Doe
123 W Beverly Ave
Talahasee,Maine
222-22-2222

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However, what I am getting is the following... 
"Jane""Doe","123
W
Beverly, Ave"
"Talahasee""Maine"

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Please help me out on this one as I am most entirely confused. I thank you in advance for any assistance on this issue and apologize for my ignorance in what should be a simple matter. peace dez L

In reply to Reading in data that is by basicdez

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