I agreed with olus

You can 'join' @test or while reading from the file itself you can read the whole file in single scalar variable using undef as.

open(FH,'<',$new_file) || die $!;
do {local undef $/;$test = <FH>};
close(FH);
while($test =~ /<!--\s+\d+nd table -->\s*(.*?)\s*<!--\s+\/\d+nd table 
+-->/sgi){
  $out_put = $1;
  print "$out_put\n";
}
[download]

I think this code is matching what did you expected

Punitha