This is almost certainly the roundabout way of doing this, but you should be able to achieve your result by replacing (s///) the commas without spaces after them with something that does not occur in your dataset, like a tilde ~, for instance. Then you can split on the tilde.

Update: While this would work, it is really a silly answer. As another poster has indicated, there is a reason why you put your split argument inside of //, and that's that it's a regular expression. (I think that using quotes suppresses regular expression processing in split, though.)