You should open your own thread if the question is different (here you just have a common topic). Maybe it's a bit late far that this time, but for your next question maybe :).

So, if you want a string that starts with two double quotes, that would be with /^""/. And then, if you have a number as a result instead of strings, you probably called grep in a scalar context (so you get the number of matches instead of the matches). Maybe you wrote $foo_d instead of @foo_d, or you forgot a ; in the previous line. Or maybe you called @foo_d in a scalar context when printing it, you'd still get a number of elements then instead of content.