It's difficult to help when you don't tell us what the problem is. We only know that the code you've given us doesn't do what you want it to to - but you haven't told us what results you were expecting.

But my telepathy is strong this early in the morning and I think I've worked out what you want. You want to extract the three string values from each line of the data. You're looking for a lightweight CSV parser. Is that right?

If that's the case, then split might not be the best approach. I'd recommend using Text::ParseWords instead - it's a standard part of the Perl distribution.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Text::ParseWords;

my @data = <DATA>;

foreach my $entry (@data)  {

  my ($var1, $var2, $var3) = parse_line(',', 0, $entry);

  print "Var1: $var1\n";
  print "Var2: $var2\n";
  print "Var3: $var3\n";
}

__DATA__
"value 1","something else","other stuff"
"asdf123","omg","hope this works"
"more tests","testy","blah"
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