"Okay, so I'll go through the data one character at a time pulling them off into an accumulator, and when I see an escape character I'll take the next character literally, and when I see a separator I'll dump the accumulated string into the results array and reset it. Hmm, so first step--iterate through the characters. [flip][flip] Ummm... [flip][flipflip] Hm. There doesn't seem to be any function in perl to pull off the first character of a string, or any easy way to explode a string into an array... [flipflip] ... or even to pull out a character by its index, though I guess I could abuse substr for that. [flip]... [flipflip]... oh. Wait, I'm doing this totally wrong, aren't I."
[split][match][capture][match][substitut
I've been programming in Java too long. See, in Java, they force you to hack your way through the jungle with a machete. In perl they give you a flamethrower, and afterward you root around in the ashes for the data you wanted. The styles are somewhat different.