Rather than thinking in terms of "splitting on spaces", may be it would work better if you thought in terms of "gather the things I want". For instance, would this work for you: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; use warnings;

my $string = q(hi my name is 'john doe');
my @parts = $string =~ /'.*?'|\S+/g;
print map { "$_\n" } @parts;
__END__

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?

duff

In reply to Re: regex to split on ' ', but skip spaces inside quotes by duff
in thread regex to split on ' ', but skip spaces inside quotes by true_atlantis

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