It sounds like you already have a good solution, but for me, the obvious one is to pop the output from split into an array, then take the first and last values.

  my @array = split(/\s+/, $_);
  my ( $key, $value ) = @array[ 0, -1 ];
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That approach doesn't care if the number of values changes -- you always get the first and the last values. Also, the split could be simplified to just

  my @array = split(/\s+/);
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because $_ is the default parameter for this function.