I would suggest using Text::CSV_XS to read/parse the CSV. It already knows how to deal with UTF-8.

It is capable of using a TAB as separation character:

use Text::CSV_XS;

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new ({ binary => 1, sep_char => "\t", auto_dia
+g => 1 });
my @headers = $csv->header ($in); # Read the docs, there are options p
+ossible here
while (my $row = $csv->getline ($in)) {
    # ...
    }
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update: I realized later that Text::CSV_XS' csv function already supports gzip as part of the encoding attribute.

use Text::CSV_XS qw( csv );
use PerlIO::via::gzip;

my $aoa = csv (in => "test.csv.gz",  encoding => ":via(gzip)");
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