For a short list like yours it doesn't really matter. But for a really big string with lots of elements, it's wasteful to create a big list (which is a copy of the string but split up) only to grab the last element. ...think along the lines of photocopying a book, and throwing away the entire copy except the last page.

Here's a method that uses a regexp to find only the last element in the string:

my $last_element;
my $line = <FILEHANDLE>;
if( $line =~ m/:([^:]*)\Z/ ) {
    $last_element = $1;
}
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