I agree that the regex's are the better choice here. I actually found the first one by BrowserUk to the best choice.
@iparray = ( $record =~ m[(\d+)]g )[0..3];
This is short and easy to understand.
My mistake in returning the value was in the statement I was using for debugging.
print "|" . join ".", @iparray . "|\n";
My guess is that it was returning the number of elements joined. I fixed it as:
print "|" . (join ".", @iparray) . "|\n";
Thanks trying to help with a possible reason/answer to my mistake. After tending to the scrapes and bruises from this post, I am back on track and a little wiser for it.

Thanks to all for your input!