I may be missing the point here but would something like this work?

$content= "bla foo bar letters stuff qwerty";
if ($content =~ /bla (.*?)qwerty/){
  print "matched!\n";
  @stuff = split /\s+/, $1;
  print "The stuff ".join(" ", @stuff)."\n"  if @stuff;
}
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Basically I'm getting all the stuff between the tokens, and splitting that on whitespace, to produce the @stuff array.