Good to know on the ;;;;;

As for the csv, I can guarentee that there is never a comma in the string that it is looking at. It is stock data, the first value is a ticker, the rest are dates or numbers that are in a standard format from the data provider (another reason I'd like to figure this out - so I can confront them with an issue with how they handle it if it turns out that it was very likely their data side - which is even more confusing since it then only screwed up when called programatically and not via a straight http connection by hand)

I only showed two lines because in the debugging that I went through, nothing else had any effect on it - so it seemed to me it would just clutter the post.

And yeah, I looked at the CSV specific modules, but I am only acting on one line of data so I just did it my way - but I'll try it out with the modules and see how it looks in the benchmarks.

I was mainly concerned that my matching text was somehow not doing what I imagined it was up to - or that the extra ; was making something behave oddly.
It seems that Perl has all kinds of lovely things built in that I always seem to find by accident and I was wondering if for some reason a ;space; after a regular expression substitution would then force the last character to be lowercase. Which to me seems insane, but then again, so do some of the other things perl does that make it great for golf :)