Well it is amazing, but check out Perl C Lib. Instead of strtol(s, &p, n) there is Strtol(s, &p, n). There are usually better regex ways to do this in Perl, but a lot of these C functions are available.

If you care to explain more what your are doing with what appear to be census records, I am sure more suggestions about how to organize and access the data will be forthcoming.

BTW: the Perl "mantra" for such situations is: "Use split when you know what you want to throw away. Use regex when you know what you want to keep". There are exceptions, but that is a pretty good general rule about when to use split vs regex.