I recently needed to parse words separated by whitespace out of a string, where a doublequoted word may contain spaces itself but no escaped doublequotes. The following regex will do, is quite tidy and also hardly backtracks (occasionally by a few characters, not more).
my @words = /"?((?<!")\S+(?!"\s)|[^"]+)"?\s*/g;

In reply to Simple way to parse whitespace separated, optionally quoted words out of a string by Aristotle

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