The title of this thread is "CSV_XS ERROR:..." -- I take that to mean that the Text::CSV_XS module is what emitted the error, regardless of which perl script invoked that module.

Here is a code snippet that duplicates the problem.

But there is no way to "duplicate the problem" if there's no sample data available that actually causes the problem. Where's the data?

I know you don't want to post your entire actual input file, and no one here wants you to do that. The problem for you is to locate the point in the file where the problem occurs, and show a sample that contains just that part, or something that is equivalent to it and also causes the same error report.

It's sad that Text::CSV(_XS) doesn't make it easy to locate the source of the problem in your data. The error message you gave as the title of this thread says "@ pos 408". If I understand correctly, this will refer to the 408th comma-delimited field, counting from the beginning of the file. If you know how many fields there should be per "record", a little arithmetic will tell you how many records there are between the start of the file and the problem. (Note that I'm referring to "records", not "lines", given that some records include embedded line-breaks.)

Something to try will be to remove initial records from the input data until the error goes away. There should be one record in particular such that you'll get the error (with a low "pos" number) when it is present at the beginning of the input, and you won't get the error when you remove it from the data.

Still, the real puzzle, according to your initial description, is why there's an error when you try to do "next" to skip some records, but no error when you don't use "next". Assuming there's an error in the data, it should occur in both cases, and whether you use "next" or not should have nothing to do with finding the error.

So either your initial description is wrong (e.g. there's something else different about the two cases, besides the presence/absence of "next"), or there's something really strange about the data, which you haven't shown.