I'm rather confused by your logic. I'm also confused by your problem domain.

You have a file. It will have "EOS" at the last line. (Or, is it between each line? I'll assume the former.) You want to read its data.

Now, what you're doing is creating a string, delimited in a certain fashion, then splitting on that delimitor immediately into a list. Why not just create a list?

Also, your logic in your parser is, well, sketchy.

my @data;
while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    next if /EOS$/;

    s/"\s?"/\t/g;
    s/"//g;
    push @data, [ split /\t/, $_ ];
}

foreach (@data) {
    my %hash;
    @hash{qw(First Last Addr City State Phone)} = @$_;

    print "$hash{First}, $hash{Last}\n";
    print "$hash{Addr}\n";
    print "$hash{City},$hash{State}\n";
    print "$hash{Phone}\n";
    print "\n";
}
[download]

Basically, read a line. Skip it if we're reading an EOS. (We, essentially, don't care about them as all our data is on one line.) Then, convert the "" or " " into tabs, then remove the extra ", then split on tab and push a listref with our data onto our master data list.

Then, when we read, we put the data for that line into a hashslice, then access the hash. :-)

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.