It seems to me that you want to create an array containing the words of the file. If you split on space like you have done split / /, $item, then you will only split on one space. I think you want to split on:

split /\s+/, $item
[download]

or just:

split ' ', $item
[download]

The last one will strip all blanks at the start as well as on the end of the string.

Autark