In nearly thirty five years of engineering I find that whilst wheels are wonderful things to invent that I could waste far too much time re-inventing all of the wheels I have had to deal with! I therefore subscribe to that wonderful programmers virtue - laziness - akin to the great engineering virtue of expediency.

Sure you can do it yourself, and module source code is a great place to learn. The parse method in Text::CSV is simply elegant. But prior to starting to use the module back in 2000 I had maintained a bundle of my own code that kept running into problems - the module has never let me down.

jdtoronto