thanks c-era here's the one that we came up with for creating the array:

while(<>) {
   @parts = ($_ =~ /.{3}/g);
   $assign = "\$hash" . join('', map { "{\'$_\'}" } @parts) . "++;";
   eval $assign;
}
[download]

Not as fast as I'd like, but I guess it's doing a lot of work...