Your split should be fine so long as there is no extraneous whitespace. Your assignment would be better as my @response = split /\,/ $response, 39; or

my %response;
@response{qw/names for all the fields/}
    = split /\,/ $response, 39;
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depending on whether you want mnemonic identifiers for the fields.

After Compline,
Zaxo