Tilly, I apologize if you were tempted into more than a cursory glance at my sample code. As I told Podmaster, I wasn't intending to debate the merits of this code. If I wanted a thorough attack for CSV files, I'd go download a CPAN module.

First, ++ to you for /\G"/cg. One of the reasons I love posting things here is to increase my understanding of the language and learn more tricks such as this one that I had not stumbled across in the documentation before.

Let me respond to your individual points:

• Golf has no value in production code.
  One of my main ideas in posting this meditation is that golfing things down to obfuscation is a bad idea in a peer-review environment, but that it is possible that moderately golfing down code into idea nuggets (arbitrary made-up term) may actually aid you in explaining code quickly.
• Your "elegant" line is one that I would fail in a code review, and I think that most reasonable people would likewise.
  I would hope so.
• You are way too fond of putting multiple lines on one.
  Idea nuggets. If I can't squeeze it into something like:
  last if !$bananna;
  then maybe I could still fit the whole thought on one line:
   if (!$bananna) { cleanup; last; }
• Walking through a string with s/(.)// is inefficient. (Walking the string is O(n*n).)
  I've seen that bandied about on Perlmonks a lot. I assume that's a logarithm reference or something.

  Yes, this code will cost plenty of extra CPU cycles. It is based on an inherently flawed approach of having two statements chew down a string for different reasons. I'd never use it in production if resources were scarce or execution speed was important.

• A toggle is better written as $quoted = !$quoted;
  My Applesoft BASIC days coming back to haunt me again. It took me a long time to get that out of my system. However, if it weren't for that beloved GOTO-laden beast of a language, I wouldn't be a coder today.
• Your code will not handle returns embedded in a quoted field.
  Thanks, forgot the  /s