I'm trying to figure out what you want this script to do, and I'm coming up blank. The best I can do for turning it into anything meaningful is as follows:

open my $datfh, '<', 'C:\begperl\my scripts\cdata.txt' or die "Couldn'
+t open file: $!\n";
while (<$datfh>) {
  print "**** Processing new input line\n";
  my @fields = (map {
    s/^\s+//; s/\s+$//; # eliminate irrelevant spaces
    $_
  } split /\|/, $_);
  for my $i (0 .. $#fields) {
    print " * '$fields[$i]'\n" unless $fields[$i] =~ /\r|\n/;
  }
}
[download]

This, of course, doesn't actually do anything. It just reads reads the file and tells you what it's reading, which you could have got just about as well by opening the file itself in a text editor and looking at it. But from just reading the information you gave us, I wasn't able to figure out what processing you wanted the script to do.