At some point adding whitespace

leads

to

reduced

clarity

and

slower

comprehension

.

Two things would clean those particular lines up in my view - adding /x as you suggest, and using a character set for the single character delimiters:

my $pattern= "([,|:>] | \\]\\[ | _\\|_)";
my @splitted= split /$pattern/x, $text;
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