Re Perl findall, I used this regex in my "clean" solution which I didn't post because I figure it's more honest to submit what worked, not the smart stuff you found out later.
regex
# find all numerals and number in English from the string $line and put them into the array @spelled my @spelled = ( $line =~ (m/(?=(\d{1}|one|two|three|four|five|six|seven|eight|nine))/g );