What you've shown is a string, i.e. a scalar, not an array. Using split can turn it into a list; you can populate an array with a list, or you can iterate over it directly:

#! /usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my $string = 'abc def xyz';
# my @array = split ' ', $string;
for my $part (split ' ', $string) {
    print "<$part>\n";
}
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