If you really want to put it all in an array at once, use this: @array = split /(?<=\r)/, $rec; If you don't have a compelling need to do that, though, then I would recommend processing it line by line:

while ($rec =~ /([^\r]+\r?)/g) {
   frobulate($1);
}
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Both of the above assume that you mean a carriage return, not a newline, when you say carriage return (and that you're not running this on a machine running Mac OS 9 or lower).