It'd probably be best to split using the magical ' '.

my $string = "   a b c  "; # note leading/trailing whitespaces

my @array1 = split /\s+/, $string; # returns '', 'a', 'b', 'c' (4 item
+s)
my @array2 = split ' ',   $string; # returns     'a', 'b', 'c' (3 item
+s)
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