No more testing than your sample, but the following could be considered a little cleaner:

use strict;
use warnings;

my @chunks = split '"', do{local $/; <DATA>}, -1;

s/(?<=.)\s*\n\s*(?=.)/ /g for @chunks;

print join '"', @chunks;

__DATA__
"boom"
hello "" bill
"baz
         hello
            jock"
"boom2"
 abc "baz2
hello2          
            jock2 "

[download]

Prints:

"boom"
hello "" bill
"baz hello jock"
"boom2"
 abc "baz2 hello2 jock2 "

[download]
DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

In reply to Re: Changing quoted strings spanning more than one line by GrandFather
in thread Changing quoted strings spanning more than one line by eyepopslikeamosquito

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