what I would probably have done is to first split the string on a comma, then pop the last entry off the resulting array.

As in:

my @array = split /,/, $string;
my $value = pop @array;
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But you don't really need an array to do that because you can get the last value directly from the list that split returns:

my $value = ( split /,/, $string )[ -1 ];
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