how to handle commas that belong in the data value

If quotes are used to disambiguate, it's fairly easy to parse with a regex:

Of course, that suffers from other problems, such as going all wonky with unbalanced quotes. But it's a fairly simple way to parse well-formed data, and I thought it might be helpful for some to look at.

Oooh, close. It is a good regex, but it suffers from the following issues:
1. As you say, it won't handle mal-formed data. A major part of a parser's job is to detect data that doesn't conform to the specification. Parsing XML would be easier with a regex if you didn't have to handle error conditions ... *grins*
2. If you have your element surround by "'s, then an embedded " is encoded as "".
3. You assume that the element will be surround by double-quotes, but single-quotes / apostrophes are also legal
4. Embedded newlines are also legal, but your regex won't handle them. (Text::CSV doesn't handle them, either, but Text::xSV does.)
5. This is a nit, but you don't handle whitespace at the end of the line. A simple \s* would handle that.
6. You don't handle whitespace between the closing double-quote and the comma. </ol

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suffers from the following issues

Oh yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of problems. I wasn't really attempting to build a general-purpose CSV parser, just demonstrating that it's not too terribly difficult to handle this kind of thing (for some values of "handle") with a regex.

A major part of a parser's job is to detect data that doesn't conform to the specification.

Indeed. That's where a single regex solution generally falls down flat. Perhaps one could make a pre-scanner that looks for problems ahead of time, but for handling arbitrary, user-supplied data, a real parser should be built (or grabbed from CPAN, as it were).

Just as a side note, I use this same technique to parse Apache logs. It's simply a matter of my @logentry = /("[^"]+"|\[[^\]]+\]|\S+)/g; and the log entry is split up nicely. Notice it handles both quote-delimited and square-bracket-delimited chunks. It looks messy, but it's dead simple. Perhaps one could even use variables to make it more readable:

my $quoted    = qr/"  [^"]+   "/x;
my $bracketed = qr/\[ [^\]]+ \]/x;
my $bare      = qr/   \S+      /x;

while (<LOGFILE>) {
  my @logentry = /($quoted|$bracketed|$bare)/g;
}
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Hopefully I haven't strayed too far off the point. Not that anyone will probably read this deeply into the thread anyway, but oh well. 8^)