If the unwanted values can be described with a regex, you can also use grep. This can be useful if you don't know where in the original value the unwanted values will occur.

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

my $list = 'foo #comment bar <tag> baz';

my ($first, $second, $third) = grep(/^\w+$/, split(' ',$list));

print<<_;
1. $first
2. $second
3. $third
_
;

C:\>perl test.pl
1. foo
2. bar
3. baz
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