my original solution (very sure this is sub-optimal!) was based on a regex expression matching:

#solution 1, using regex and parsewords
use Text::ParseWords;
my $file     = "zs_PS0001_9_epack_2006b.csv";
open(FILE,"<$file") or die("Could not open $file: $!.");

$count = 0;
    
# Process the data.
while (<FILE>){
    # Line used to debug the script taking only a few lines.
    exit if ($count >= 20);
    #print "=========================== Record $count\n";
    $count++;
    print "myCounter: ", $count , "\n";

    @words= $_ =~ m/"[^"\r\n]*"|[^,\r\n]*/mg;
    @result = &quotewords(',', 0, @words );

#build the array for the database command
#@myArray=($result[0],$result[2],$result[4],$result[6],$result[8],$res
+ult[10],$result[12],$result[14],$result[16],$result[18]);
  
    my $courseID=$result[0];
    my $sessionID=$result[1];
    my $userID=$result[2];
    my $PersonID=$result[3];
    my $mydatetime=$result[4];
    my $millisecond=$result[5];
    my $loc=$result[6];
    my $action=$result[7];
    my $page=$result[8];
    my $time=$result[9];
        
    print STDOUT "result: ", $courseID,"\n";
    print STDOUT "result: ", $sessionID,"\n";
    print STDOUT "result: ", $userID,"\n";
    print STDOUT "result: ", $PersonID,"\n";
    print STDOUT "result: ", $mydatetime,"\n";
    print STDOUT "result: ", $millisecond,"\n";
    print STDOUT "result: ", $loc,"\n";
    print STDOUT "result: ", $action,"\n";
    print STDOUT "result: ", $page,"\n";
    print STDOUT "result: ", $time,"\n";
    
    print STDOUT "***********\n";
}
# end solution 1_______________________
[download]

# solution 2, using text:csv_xs
use Text::CSV_XS;
my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new();
$count=0;

my $file = 'PS0002_9_2006b.txt';
if (defined $ARGV[0]) {
    $file = $ARGV[0];
}
 
my $sum = 0;
open(my $data, '<', $file) or die "Could not open '$file'\n";
while (my $line = <$data>) {
    chomp $line;
    exit if ($count >= 20);
    $count++;
    if ($csv->parse($line)) {
        my @columns = $csv->fields();

        $sum += $columns[2];
    } else {
        warn "Line could not be parsed: $line\n";
    }
}
print "$sum\n";
# end solution 2_______________________
[download]

now, if I'm running any of these with my CSV files, this is what i get (example from the first loop):
myCounter: 1
result: ■z s _ P S 0 0 0 1 _ 9 _ e p a c k
result: 9 1 6 9 4 9 8 1 1 0 2 1
result: g u e s t
result: 9 1 6 9 4 7 6 2 7 0 2 1
result: 2 0 0 6 - 1 0 - 1 1 2 3 : 1 2 : 0 0 . 0 0 0
result: 1 1 6 0 6 0 4 7 2 0 0 0 0
result: l o g o u t
result: l o g i n
result: W e b C T V i s t a s e r v e r
result: 0
***********

I've no idea why there are spaces which are not displayed in the file opened with any application... i had a look at the encoding and attempted to convert the files; it seems that with utf-16 the output looks like the above, but I'm loosing the spaces if I'm re-saving it in utf-8.
the problem I'm having is that there is something wrong which is messing up the string; solution 2 doesn't work at all refusing to parse the csv as lines. depending on the encoding of the file you can see a 'funny' box char at the start above, in utf8 it looks like this:
´╗┐zs_PS0001_9_epack ....(rest of the line)
does anyone have any suggestion? thanks for your help!

by the way, i tried also to substitute the first char with no avail: the char is removed from each line but the first(ie)

    
my $courseID=substr($result[0],1);
[download]

finally, if anyone has enlightment about this, when i went back to edit this post i noticed that what i pasted in from the cmd window shows as a code: more precisely as ■ in the first example and as ´╗┐ in the second.

lorenzo