Why do I need qualitative tests? I just wanted to know if the RE's broke the line into the expected number of sections. The original test strings were read from a data file, which was several pared down representations of what one might find as attr-value fields after an initial xml or html element.

How are unpaired quotes handled? That's really a bit undefined, but I thought terminating them at the end of the "string", would be most forgiving. For multi-whitespace -- I would assume shell semantics. Multi-line input -- in some larger more general case, lf+cr are both types of white space, but I didn't want to clutter my question and test cases. As for whitespace prefixes and suffixes -- in both cases, there is no "non-whitespace" before or after (respectivly) those, so they make no difference in the final answer.

As I tried to stress, the program wasn't really important, it was just something I threw together over a few hours that grew by "whim", to test the regex's against the input lines in the test-data.txt file. It wasn't meant as a formal test harness.