If the distribution of white-space (including new-lines) is as chaotic as your sample suggests, something like this might be useful: slurp the whole file into a single scalar, as suggested in an earlier reply, then do a while loop over a regex match: 
my $indata;
open( I, "<", "vrml.file" ) or die "vrml.file: $!";
{
    local $/;
    $indata = <>;
}

while ( $indata =~ /\[              # match open sq-bracket
                    ((?:\s*\d+){3}) # match 3 numerics
                    ,               # match comma
                    ((?:\s*\d+){3}) # match 3 more numerics
                    \]              # match close sq-bracket
                   /gx )
{
    my ( $x, $y ) = ( $1, $2 );
    s/^\s+// for ( $x, $y );
    my @x = split " ", $x;
    my @y = split " ", $y;

    # @x and @y each contain 3 numeric values

    my $axis = "x";
    for my $aref ( \@x, \@y ) {
        print scalar @$aref, " elements in $axis array: @$aref\n";
        $axis++;
    }
}

[download]
The "x" modifier on the regex allows me to break up and comment the regex components for legibility. The "g" modifier will repeat the match throughout the data, and for every segment of data in the string (i.e. in the content of the file as a whole), I get one iteration of the while loop, with $1 and $2 set to the first and second sets of three digits.

In reply to Re: accessing specific data in a file by graff
in thread accessing specific data in a file by phoenixQueen

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