split/Perl question

I have a colon delimited text file that I need parse thru and grab each value.
My problem is that some values actually contain a colon. Using the code below
is not quite enough to extract the values:

while (<>) {
@array = split(":", "$_");
}

I seem to recall this same problem before but can not remember
what I did to get around this. Can anyone point me in the right
direction?

v/r
-Mike