I have trouble fully grasping your intention, especially because your example text and your description overlap.

Could it be you are looking for recursive parsing, where anything in "quotes" won't be broken up at period?

perldocs have examples for implementing this.

In reply to Re: How to enforce match priority irrespective of string position by Takeshi Kovacs
in thread How to enforce match priority irrespective of string position by Polyglot

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