Here you go.. not much duplication, supports escaping quotes, and properly fails if there's garbage in the input (you can replace the die with more elegant error handling) 

# skip initial whitespace, if any
$tag =~ /^\s*/gcxs;

# look for optional key, and a bareword or the start of a quoted strin
+g
while ($tag =~ / \G (?: (\w+) \s* = \s*)? ( ['"](?=.) | \w+ ) /gcxs) {
    my ($k, $v) = ($1, $2);

    # extract quoted string
    if ($v eq "'" || $v eq '"') {
        $tag =~ / \G ( (?: \\. | [^$v] )* ) $v /gcxs or last;
        $v = $1;
        $v =~ s/\\(.)/$1/g;    # unescape characters
    }

    # skip optional separator
    $tag =~ / \G \s* :? \s* /gcxs;

    # save value
    push @args, $k ? [$k, $v] : $v;
}

# check if parsing was successful
die if pos $tag != length $tag;

[download]

•Update: If you like, you can ofcourse precompile the quote-patterns so you don't have any variable patterns, like: 

my %quotes;
$quotes{$_} = qr/ \G ( (?: \\. | [^$_] )* ) $_ /xs for qw(' ");

[download]
and then replace the if-block with: 
    if (my $pat = $quotes{$v}) {
        $tag =~ /$pat/gc or last;
        $v = $1;
        $v =~ s/\\(.)/$1/g;
    }

[download]
But I don't know if that results in any significant increase in speed.

In reply to Re: Parsing arguments by xmath
in thread Parsing arguments by hv

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