#! perl -sw
use strict;

sub tokenize ($) {
	local $_ = shift;
	s/(('|").*?\2)/ ($£ = $1) =~ s!\s+!\cA!g; $£ /ge; #!"
	grep{s/\cA/ /g, $_}split/\s+/;
}

my @bits = tokenize q/a  "b c d"  e    f 'g h' ijk "l m n " op 'q r s t' u'v w'x yz/;

local $,='|';
print  @bits,$/;

__END__
c:\test>212174
a|"b c d"|e|f|'g h'|ijk|"l m n "|op|'q r s t'|u'v w'x|yz|