So you want the first entry of the key/value set in your @array, where each entry in the @array is a comma separated list of key/val?

my %hash = map { @_ = split /,/, $_; $_[0] => $_[1] } @array;
my $first_key = (sort keys %hash)[0];
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You might not want to code it quite so compactly in a real app, but you should get the gist of it - turn into a hash, then take the first key from sorting the keys.

Is that what you mean?