... but please advice the use of Text::CSV_XS and/or Text::CSV..

I think ww did "advise" that on the second point, though he didn't mention one.

..But if you're still going to do it in Perl, it looks as though you have a comma-delimited source file, AKA, CSV. So use one of the csv modules to drag in your data (not that what you were doing is terribly wrong).