FWIW: split is using a regex, hence you could also try a negative lookbehind assertion (like /(?<!^)-/ ) to make sure a '-' at string's start isn't used for splitting.

Demo in debugger using perl -de0

  DB<4> x split /(?<!^)-/, "X-Y-Z"
0  'X'
1  'Y'
2  'Z'
  DB<5> x split /(?<!^)-/, "-X-Y-Z"
0  '-X'
1  'Y'
2  'Z'
  DB<6>
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