"...i'm worrying about is its speed...the data is already in the script...what about tens of thousands of strings?"

I assume you expect/want qweqwe rtyr tyr \'asdasd fghfghfgh as output, right?

Perhaps it might be an alternative to write your data to a file as JSON with something like this:

use JSON::XS;
my $data = [qw( qweqwe rtyr tyr \'asdasd fghfghfgh)];
my $json = encode_json $data; 
# to file...
[download]

Then process your data line by line as usual:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use JSON::XS;
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature qw (say);
# use Data::Dump;

open my $fh, '<', 'data.dat' or die $!;

while ( my $line = <$fh> ) {
    chomp $line;
    say nikolay( decode_json($line) );
}

close $fh;

sub nikolay {
    my $data = shift;
    join " ", @$data; # what ever...
}

__END__

karls-mac-mini:monks karl$ ./json.pl 
qweqwe rtyr tyr \'asdasd fghfghfgh

...
[download]

Please see also JSON::XS, JSON and Benchmark.

Edit: Link added.

Best regards, Karl