Your update underscores a point I like to make. Whenever you can, avoid C style loops in favour of Perl's foreach construction. Thus you would write: 
foreach my $i (0..$#line) {
  $record[$row]{$fieldname[$i]}=$line[$i];
}

[download]
The reason is that you will make fewer fencepost errors that way. (One of the most common bugs in C, but generally automatically avoidable in Perl.

Beyond that I would recommend using a -1 for the third argument to split, and given that you have tabular data I would lose the loop entirely for a slice: 

my %rec;
@rec{@fields} = split(/,/, $_, -1);
$record[$row] = \%rec;

[download]
(I would actually clean it up even more, more on that in another post.)

In reply to Re (tilly) 3: Help with parsing through a comma delimted file by tilly
in thread Help with parsing through a comma delimted file by vonman

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.