I somehow agree that the example and explanation ("whole string", "language processing") in the tutorial is not well chosen.

An example showing how to split ...

• "I don't think 'don't' isn't a word"

... into individual words might be better.

That's actually still not that easy, just Perl complying to Unicode standards doesn't make it trivial

Edit

The best I could up with is to use a split on word boundaries, and to discard punctuation and whitespace in a grep.

DB<13> $str = "I don't think 'don't' isn't >

  DB<14> x split /\b{wb}/, $str
0  'I'
1  ' '
2  'don\'t'
3  ' '
4  'think'
5  ' '
6  '\''
7  'don\'t'
8  '\''
9  ' '
10  'isn\'t'
11  ' '
12  'a'
13  ' '
14  'word'
  DB<15>
[download]

Update

Like... ($str expanded with more edge cases)

  DB<27> $str = "I don't think, 'don't' isn't  a   word..."

  DB<28> x @list= split /\b{wb}/, $str
0  'I'
1  ' '
2  'don\'t'
3  ' '
4  'think'
5  ','
6  ' '
7  '\''
8  'don\'t'
9  '\''
10  ' '
11  'isn\'t'
12  ' '
13  'a'
14  '   '
15  'word'
16  '.'
17  '.'
18  '.'
  DB<29> x grep { not /^\W|\s+$/  } @list
0  'I'
1  'don\'t'
2  'think'
3  'don\'t'
4  'isn\'t'
5  'a'
6  'word'
  DB<30>
[download]

Update

FWIW grep { ! /^\W+$/ } yield the same result, but I'm not convinced the example is already covering all edge cases...

Update 2025-04-13

FWIW

"Francis' car" is an example for what would still fail. The apostrophe will not be part of the first word after splitting. Admittedly a tough problem.