qw/STRING/

Evaluates to a list of the words extracted out of STRING, using embedded whitespace as the word delimiters. It can be understood as being roughly equivalent to:

       split(" ", q/STRING/);

the differences being that it generates a real list at compile time, and in scalar context it returns the last element in the list. So this expression:

    qw(foo bar baz)
is semantically equivalent to the list:

    "foo", "bar", "baz"