I don't believe that this is what happened. e.g.

use Data::Dumper;

my @ar = "fred bert";

print Dumper(\@ar);
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produces

$VAR1 = [
          'fred bert'
        ];
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I can't match the summary with your full code either to see where it doesn't DWIM from your perspective. Perhaps you could step through the code using perl -d. Enter the h command to get the list of commands when using the perl debugger. At each step, the x command can be used to examine variables to see whether the last executed statement performed as you expected.