I cannot enumerate all the difficulties associated with trying to parse a string where delimiters between quotes should be treated as text and not delimiters. But here are a few problems...

• How do you provide for escaping delimiters aside from the quoting?
• How do you provide for allowing quotes that are acting as text items rather than as quoting mechanisms?
• How do you allow for nested levels of quote like characters?
• Is ' the same as ", the same as `, the same as ....?

Those reasons and others make it much better to parse such entities using a "balanced text" module. And what sauok was telling you was that Text::Balanced is a "core" module, meaning, a module that if you have Perl, you have that module already, without waiting for a sysadmin to install it.

And what others have also suggested is that even if you can't use a CORE module (a module that comes with Perl, just like stdio.h comes with C), at very least you can use your web browser to view the source of a module, on the CPAN website. Then, you can have a look at what tools are used to accomplish your objective.

Otherwise, you're wasting your efforts and building a broken solution.