I have searched cpan and here and haven't found a good answer to this basic question. I have a string which has comma separated values, but there is nesting within parens. 
$str = 'sue,fred,x(mary,jane)';

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I want to break this string into a three elements... 
['sue','fred','x(mary,jane)']

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where, 'mary' and 'jane' are two args of function x which I am going to resolve by processing the third item later on

Not four elements... 
['sue','fred','x(mary','jane)']

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I have tried several ideas like splitting and then recombining adjacent elements that should not have been split, but was hoping for a cleaner solution.

In reply to csv'ish string with parens that include commas by ascetic

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