in reply to ignore some delimiters while using split

You can index lists from the end. Untested:
my ($str1, $str2, $str3) = (split ' ', $line)[-3, -2, -1]; print if $str1 eq $str2 && $str2 eq $str3;
Or as a one-liner (also untested):
perl -ane 'print if $F[-3] eq $F[-2] && $F[-2] eq $F[-1]' data-file