I to use Text::CSV quite happily. I spent forever and a day (actually, about 6 hours) trying to debug a problem with it, that was finally answered deep within the documentation. When it says:

Allowable characters within a CSV field include 0x09 (tab) and the inclusive range of 0x20 (space) through 0x7E (tilde).

It means it. In particular, if you get anything outside of this range, including any MS curly-quotes or (in my case) a single oddly out-of-range byte, it will quietly fail.

Note that it does not accept newlines inside any field either.