You're mixing two concepts together. When you said

split /[\w|\W]/
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you meant

split /[\w\W]/
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or

split /\w|\W/
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The above would be better written as

split /./s
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That said, it doesn't work. If you want to separate every character, the characters aren't the separators, the nothings between each character are. You want:

split //, $x
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The following would also do:

$x =~ /./sg
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