This one-liner suits all of your requirements (no split or regex). Getting the actual value from the config file into a string variable is your responsibility.

perl -E '$s="abc def ghi";@a=unpack("(a)*",$s);$x;@b;for(@a){chomp;if(
+ord($_)!=32){$x.=$_}else{push@b,$x;undef$x}};push@b,$x;END{say$_ for@
+b}'
[download]

You now have an array, @b, that looks like this:

$b[0] = 'abc';
$b[1] = 'def';
$b[2] = 'ghi';
[download]