I agree that it is usually better practice to use a regex as a split pattern (and I have upvoted this post, contrary to the majority of viewers as of this writing), because split is really geared on using regex patterns (IMHO), but saying that it requires a regex is somewhat of an exageration: it can work with other expressions like a single character or even a string. Although, with a string, the results can sometimes be sometimes somewhat unexpected when the string contains wierd characters... But using a single character such as '#', as done by the OP, does work fine:

  DB<1> $c = "jdskq#jdskl"

  DB<2> @d = split '#', $c;

  DB<3> x @d
0  'jdskq'
1  'jdskl'
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blah blah blah

split demands a regex, it doesn't accept strings, it takes patterns, doesn't matter how you quote '#' its a regex pattern

the split function requires a regex.