Another method is to use regex s/// to clean up string and then just use split.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
my $s = '1,2,3,4,"fine",,,"day","today",,,';
$s =~ s/['"]//g; #no quotes
my @s = split(/,/,$s);
print Dumper \@s;
__END__
$VAR1 = [
'1',
'2',
'3',
'4',
'fine',
'',
'',
'day',
'today'
];
Update: I personally prefer the {} syntax of grep. Example: to "get rid of the blank tokens above, just
@s = grep {/\S/}@s;. If you want to get rid of some undef values:
@s = grep{defined $_}@s. Perl grep is a filtering operation. Perl map is a transformation operation. Use grep when you just want a subset of the data and aren't changing it. Use map when you are transforming the data input into something else.