I ended up parsing it in Excel, of all things. I don't remember my workflow, but I think I had a couple different sheets to break down (and then rebuild) the individual stats. Basically text-to-columns for |, then copy the slave description/vital stats to a different sheet and parse by ^, then write a quick and dirty concantenate function to recompile everything back into a single row and dump into Notepad++. It was ugly, but suprisingly functional and easy to use. Just make sure you set all columns to "Text" if you're doing a text-to-columns as Excel is awful at guessing correctly.
I mostly did it to get an understanding of which save-file variables addressed specific game parameters.