chomp is not needed here, you can see this through this demo:

use Data::Dumper;

use strict;
use warnings;

$_ = "1 2\n3\t4\r\n5\n";
my @words = split;
print Dumper(\@words);
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It gives you:

$VAR1 = [
          '1',
          '2',
          '3',
          '4',
          '5'
        ];
[download]