The section of the documentation to CGI.pm that you are looking at demonstrates the capture of both single parameters and groups of parameters with a common name. This is explained in the two paragraphs that follow the example.

Assuming that you have passed a parameter named `address' to your script you may access it in a number of ways, commonly: 
my $value = $q->param('address');

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...where $q is your CGI object. In the event that you want to put all the form parameters into a hash using the Vars method, you may access the value as follows: 
my $v = $q->Vars;
my $value = $v->{'address'};

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In both of these examples, the only significance of the word `address' is that it was the name of the parameter passed by the referring form (or otherwise for the purpose of demonstration).

The line with the split illustrates how, having used the Vars method, one might separate a list of values with a common parameter name into an array. This may, however, be done in the following, more natural way: 
my @array_of_values = $q->param('multi_values');

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...where `multi_values' is, perhaps, the name of a bunch of checkboxes in the referring form.

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In reply to Re: Getting hash of CGI variables by matthewb
in thread Getting hash of CGI variables by Lori713

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