Ah. I was fooled by Parse::CSV making a big deal that "other modules" wrapped Text::CSV_XS. Thanks for the correction.

"When I say single character separator, I mean it." One glance at the source code and it's obvious the author doesn't mean single character; he means single byte. There's nothing at all in the module about any character encoding—least of all about one of the Unicode character encoding schemes

Yes, that is what I expected. A Perl module doing absolutely nothing about character encodings is the way that a module is most likely to be able to deal with UTF-8 characters just fine. When modules try to deal with UTF-8 characters, then you end up having to deal with how the module author chose to do things rather than just dealing with how Perl chose to deal with UTF-8.

I've had a hand in getting Unicode support into many layers of quite a few projects and the biggest problems have always been with the modules that try to do stuff with encodings. The only problems I recall with modules that don't deal with encodings is the few that deal with protocols with something like a Content-Length: header where the module naively uses length() when it should have used bytes::length().

But CSV parsing isn't even close to rocket surgery. There are a few common pitfalls. It takes just a small bit of competence and/or research to implement CSV parsing quite correctly. I really don't see the big deal with Text::CSV_XS needing to be all-singing/all-dancing. That just leads to bloat.

Heck, if I were implementing a CSV parsing module, I'd probably have separate code for the case of single-character separators, quotes, and escapes. Because the reasonable way to implement CSV parsing efficiently is rather different between when "quote" is a single character and when it is more than 1 character.

So I see no problem having a whole separate module for dealing with multi-character quotes. Use the standard module if you don't have to deal with such. Use the other module when you do. Each module is simpler because the multi-character one doesn't have to also try to include code to maximize efficiency for when a quote is a single character.