Next you'll be asking why there are two spaces between bytes instead of one. Here, maybe this will help.

use Data::Dump;
my $banana = 'banana';
my @a = split /(..)/, $banana;
dd(\@a);
my @b = $banana =~ /(..)/g;
dd(\@b);
__END__
["", "ba", "", "na", "", "na"]
["ba", "na", "na"]
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