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^)