myomancer,
I can do it with brute force, but would prefer elegance

I hope you aren't confusing conciseness with elegance. There are not always related. See the following:

my $str   = "0010+2+O?'Reilly'";
my @field = map {s/\?'/'/g; $_ } split /\+/ , substr($str,0, (length $
+str) - 1);
print "[$_]$field[$_]\n" for 0 .. $#field;
[download]

IMO, the code would be more elegant broken out into multiple lines - perhaps with comments.