Thanks for taking the time to study my code and provide feedback.

"your original solution handles lines like this properly:

    Bangladesh,"Claire, Laura, Phillip, Pascale",70016,"5,6,7,8"

whereas s/$re,/$+{field}\037/g will never dequote the last field."

I made reference to the fact that we're dealing with "very specific input" in "Re^4: Suggestions to make this code more Perlish". I also alluded to the fact that different code would be required if the input changed.

You're correct in saying that it "will never dequote the last field"; however, the last field (in this "very specific input") is an unquoted integer, so no dequoting is required.

"One other minor observation: \037 is an atom, ..."

Yes, that's how I used \037 (along with \036 and \012) in:

$ perl -pe 'y/\036\037/\012|/' pm_1080161_output.tff
[download]

"... so no brackets are needed in s/[\037]+$//;"

The use of brackets here was a conscious decision to make it more obvious what the '+' quantifier referred to.

You're correct in saying that 's/\037+$//' would have worked as well as 's/[\037]+$//'.