"BTW, this is a good example of why using a module such as Text::CSV is often better than doing one's own solution."

Yes, I absolutely agree. Beyond being an interesting academic exercise, reinventing this particular wheel has little merit.

Furthermore, while solutions have been coded for a very specific input, they'll need to be recoded for escaped quotes, whitespace around field separators and anything else that Text::CSV has already taken into consideration but which we haven't catered for yet.