As I said, the problem was probably me and not Text::CSV_XS. But so as not to be elusive I'll fill you in as to why I gave up on it.

Firstly I was working on something that had to done as fast as humanly (or inhumanly as the case sometimes is) possible, so when I encountered the problems with Text::CSV_XS I didn't spend too much time on figuring out what wrong.
I wasn't doing anything particularly fancy or neat, just formatting some data from a TDF. But for some reason it would only find 4 of 9 records, and I can't see why. There wasn't anything too gruesome in the data (as it was created to be as friendly as possible) and splitting it on "\t" seemed to work a treat so I stuck with that.

If you're interested in the code it was something like this -

use strict;
use Text::CSV_XS;

my $tdf = Text::CSV_XS->new({'sep_char'=>"\t"});
open(TDF, "somedata.tdf") or die("b0rk - $!");
my @fields = ();
while($tdf->parse(scalar <TDF>)) {
    @fields = $tdf->fields();
    print "@fields\n";
}
[download]

That seems to work fine on some simple data, but it broke on the data I was feeding it, so I'm guessing that the data was the root of the problem (and I would've dug further but I was under a *wee* bit of pressure ;o). I should imagine I'll use it if the need ever arises again, and hopefully the data behaves itself this time (assuming it was the data ...)
HTH

broquaint