split on comma, UNLESS comma is within ""

well if I understand correctly, you want to split on commas that are NOT in a quoted string?  This can be tricky since the split() function will not differentiate between the two.  You can push perl in the right direction though by doing some altering first:

my $string = 'cellone,celltwo,"cell has, comma",cell four';
$string =~ s/"(.*?)\,(.*?)"/$1::$2/g;
for (split(/\,/, $string)) {
   s/\:\:/,/g;
   print $_,"\n";
}

I don't think I want to add characters to intermediate results.
They may also be there. :-)
The more I look at this, the more it appears its a little program.

See
perldoc -w split

>I don't think I want to add characters to intermediate results.
>They may also be there. :-)
>The more I look at this, the more it appears its a little program.

I am not sure you fully understand.  My example above adds nothing to any intermediate results.  It temporarily masks the commans inside of double quotes so split() does not split on them and then changes them back for further processing.

#this does not work
my $string = '"cellone",celltwo,cellthree,"cell, has, comma",cell::four';
$string =~ s/"(.*?)\,(.*?)"/$1::$2/g;
for (split(/\,/, $string)) {
   s/\:\:/,/g;
   print $_,"\n";
}


perldoc -q split
       How can I split a [character] delimited string except when inside
       [character]? (Comma-separated files)

               Take the example case of trying to split a string that is
               comma-separated into its different fields.  (We'll pretend you
               said comma-separated, not comma-delimited, which is different
               and almost never what you mean.) You can't use "split(/,/)"
               because you shouldn't split if the comma is inside quotes.  For
               example, take a data line like this:

                   SAR001,"","Cimetrix, Inc","Bob Smith","CAM",N,8,1,0,7,"Error, Core Dumped"

               Due to the restriction of the quotes, this is a fairly complex
               problem.  Thankfully, we have Jeffrey Friedl, author of a
               highly recommended book on regular expressions, to handle these
               for us.  He suggests (assuming your string is contained in
               $text):

                    @new = ();
                    push(@new, $+) while $text =~ m{
                        "([^\"\\]*(?:\\.[^\"\\]*)*)",?  # groups the phrase inside the quotes
                      | ([^,]+),?
                      | ,
                    }gx;
                    push(@new, undef) if substr($text,-1,1) eq ',';

               If you want to represent quotation marks inside a quotation-
               mark-delimited field, escape them with backslashes (eg, "like
               \"this\"".  Unescaping them is a task addressed earlier in this
               section.

               Alternatively, the Text::ParseWords module (part of the stan-
               dard Perl distribution) lets you say:

                   use Text::ParseWords;
                   @new = quotewords(",", 0, $text);

               There's also a Text::CSV (Comma-Separated Values) module on
               CPAN.

yes but you can say that about anything.  LOL..

Use 27 semi colons or 17 percent signs or something you are sure will not be in the object string naturally. No one solution will suffice for all possible data strings.  Even the example for comma seperated files above can be broken by carefully crafted quotes.

# Split a comma delimited string, where commas may appear inside quotes:

undef @field;
push(@field, defined($1) ? $1:$3) while
    m/"([^"\\]*(\\.[^"\\]*)*)"|([^,]+)/g;