Let's start with an example that you can take and adapt to fit your comma-separated datafile. Download (use link at bottom of this node) or cut & paste this code & adapt it. Here's an example of parsing a file containing 3 comma-delimited fields: 
#!perl -w
use strict;

open(FILE, "< csv_filename") or die "Couldn't open file, $!";

while(<FILE>) {
   chomp;  # Remove the newline
   my ($var1, $var2, $var3) = split /,/;
   print $var1," ",$var2," ",$var3,"\n";
}
exit;

[download]
We can move on to what you want to do next after you get past reading the file & parsing each line successfully.

In reply to Re: Stripping a seemingly complicated comma-delimited file by virtualsue
in thread Stripping a seemingly complicated comma-delimited file by jamesSA

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