Thanks for the help. My gut told me it was a simple fix but I just couldn't see it.

Perhaps a slightly-safer split-regex might be: /\s*,\s*/ or something along those lines.

This splits on “a comma, preceded and followed by zero-or-more whitespace characters.”   So the match will occur whether-or-not the comma is surrounded on either side by whitespace, and will “eat” both the comma and the whitespace.

$ perl -e 'use Data::Dumper; my $a = "a, b , c,d"; my @b = split(/\s*,
+\s*/, $a); print Data::Dumper->Dump([\@b], ['b']);'
$b = [
       'a',
       'b',
       'c',
       'd'
     ];
[download]

$ perl -e 'use Data::Dumper; my $a = " a, b , c,d "; my @b = split(/\s
+*,\s*/, $a); print Data::Dumper->Dump([\@b], ['b']);'
$b = [
       ' a',
       'b',
       'c',
       'd '
     ];
[download]

Therefore, an equally good possible strategy therefore would be to split on /,/ alone, then separately remove leading and/or trailing whitespace from each piece.   Or, remove any leading and/or trailing whitespace from the entire line before splitting it up as described.   If you do not care to install String::Util to get access to a trim() function, you can also use this Perl-foo to remove leading and trailing whitespace:  $str =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//g