Looking at your sample data, it seems like there may be newline characters embedded within some of the fields -- this would explain how some lines begin with a comma. If that's the issue you are trying to cope with, someone else just posted a very similar question a little while ago: Clean data - where field contains a CRLF

If you know there should always be 12 comma-separated values in a row of data, you may need to concatenate two consecutive lines in order to get a complete row, which was the topic of that other thread.

(I thought about recommending a module such as Text::xSV, but your data file would need to be edited in order to conform to the formatting constraints for "standard" CSV files -- there would need to be double quotes around any field that contains a newline.)