What i want to do is split a comma delimited string on all commas that are not preceded by a "\"

that is: 
my $str = 'this,is\,a,string';

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should be broken up into "this", "is\,a", "string"

I tried the following segment of code:
my @splits = split(/[^\\],/,$str);

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which works, except, that it uses the character directly before the comma as part of the split. The above RE gives me the following:
"thi", "is\,", "strin"

What would be the best way to split this line?

In reply to RE Dropping last Character by Anonymous Monk

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