The quotes are what is messing it up and causing the unexpected behaviour. Since it doesn't find a matching closing quote it fails to match, and returns nothing. I am assuming that the advantage over this module over just using split is that you can tokenise something like

"foo\tbar"\tfoo\tbar\t'bar\t\tbar'
[download]

into:

foo\tbar
foo
bar
bar\t\tbar
[download]

instead of just splitting at every \t (in this case).

-enlil