I was under the impression that split employs regexes to do it's bidding and if no particular one is specified, it defaults to /\s+/. Maybe it also runs a =~ s/^\s+//; before matching the split field. I'm not sure about the underlying implementation but I thought one of my O'Reilly boox described split like this. Is that not the case? TTFN & Shalom.

-PipTigger