Yeah, since you are using quoted text with contained commas I would certainly look into the CSV modules on CPAN...

or get rid of the quotes and as long as your keys and values don't contain any commas you could do...

$line = 'key1,value1,key2,value2';

my %foo = split ',', $line;
print $foo{key2};
#prints the value associated with key2, i.e. value2
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                - Ant