I am not sure I understand the regex being used by perlmonkey and snowcrash's answers...

Assuming your delimiters are 

' ',',', or ';',
for example, doing 

perl -e'print join "!!",split /([ ,;])/,"This sentence contains, in he
+re, a comma; and there's a semicolon clause\n";'

[download]
gives us: 
This!! !!sentence!! !!contains!!,!!!! !!in!! !!here!!,!!!! !!a!! !!comma!!;!!!! !!and!! !!there's!! !!a!! !!semicolon!! !!clause
This trick uses the fact that 
join "{some delimiter string}",@array
returns the contents of @array, separated by the delimiter string.

As you can see, things like ", " confuse it, so you might want to use a + inside the parentheses if you can afford to collect multiple separators into one array slot. 

perl -e'print join "!!",split /([ ,;]+)/,"This sentence contains, in h
+ere, a comma; and there's a semicolon clause\n";'

[download]
That's a bit better; now we get: 
This!! !!sentence!! !!contains!!, !!in!! !!here!!, !!a!! !!comma!!; !!and!! !!there's!! !!a!! !!semicolon!! !!clause
Hope this helps...

In reply to Re: splitting by rmgiroux
in thread splitting by Eugene

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