If you want to preserve whitespace inside double quotes, you can use Text::CSV instead of split:

use warnings;
use strict;
use Text::CSV;
use Data::Dumper;

my $str = q(xxxxx "alpha 2" xxx xxxxx "name " xxx xxx xxxx xxx);
my $csv = Text::CSV->new( { binary => 1, sep_char => ' '} )  # should 
+set binary attribute.
                or die "Cannot use CSV: ".Text::CSV->error_diag ();
my $status  = $csv->parse($str);        # parse a CSV string into fiel
+ds
my @columns = $csv->fields();           # get the parsed fields
print Dumper(\@columns);

__END__

$VAR1 = [
          'xxxxx',
          'alpha 2',
          'xxx',
          'xxxxx',
          'name ',
          'xxx',
          'xxx',
          'xxxx',
          'xxx'
        ];
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