Although i've never used Text::Balance before, i think the problem is that your escaped double quote is not surrounded in double quotes itself.

For instance, let's change the escape character to \, but leave the delimiter as is. Your string has to be "\"this\"" "line" "has" "four" to work. So, if we change the escaped char back to a double quote, it should be: """this""" "line" "has" "four" to be escaped properly.

I did a test run and got:

"""this"""
 "line" "has" "four"
[download]

as an answer.

I may be way off, but i tried. :)

HTH

--
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." --Paul Ehrlich