well i'm running the script on a linux machine, but i'm guessing the csv file was probably created on windows and has some funny windows encoding or something like that...?

I tried using Text::CSV_XS

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new({
     'quote_char'  => '"',
     'escape_char' => '"',
     'sep_char'    => ',',
     'binary'      => 1
});
[download]

I changed binary to 1 and that solved a similar problem I had with another csv file, but hasn't made a difference to this file.

Is there a setting somewhere for different types of files, like those created on windows or those from unix?