I agree with the comments that DBI would be overkill. DBI is a great module, but get some more experience with more basic perl before trying to tackle it.

The Perl Cookbook has a recipe for parsing comma-separated data. This recipe (1.15) is taken from Mastering Regular Expressions. (My apologies if posting this is inappropriate).

BEGIN QUOTED MATERIAL:

Use the procedure in Mastering Regular Expressions.

sub parse_csv {
    my $text = shift;      # record containing comma-separated values
    my @new  = ();
    push(@new, $+) while $text =~ m{
        # the first part groups the phrase inside the quotes.
        # see explanation of this pattern in MRE
        "([^\"\\]*(?:\\.[^\"\\]*)*)",?
           |  ([^,]+),?
           | ,
       }gx;
       push(@new, undef) if substr($text, -1,1) eq ',';
       return @new;      # list of values that were comma-separated
}
[download]

Or use the standard Text::ParseWords module.

use Text::ParseWords;

sub parse_csv {
    return quotewords(",",0, $_[0]);
}
[download]

END QUOTED MATERIAL

The Perl Cookbook is a must-have book for any perl programmer. If you don't have a copy, please buy one. It has helped me immensely.