I had a similar problem a while back, except I was concerned with quotes, not parens. Text::ParseWords helped me out quite a bit. I haven't really looked at the code for that module, but maybe it can give you an idea or two?

In reply to Re: Splitting a comma-delimited string where a substring could countain commas by mephit
in thread Splitting a comma-delimited string where a substring could contain commas by Eisbar

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