Greetings,
I would suggest using a word boundary \b. for instance...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $line = "earth, wind & fire";
my @chunks = split /\b/, $line;

print Dumper(\@chunks);
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Which produces what you want... well close. If you don't want the spaces around your punctuation marks this

#need the grep to filter for truth! 
#basically checking if 
#the element is defined/filled-in/not-blank
my @chunks = grep{$_} split /\b|\s/, $line;
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should do the trick.

---

Update! Upon re-reading your post I am a bit unclear... Do you want to keep the punctuations or not?
if not

#either this
my @no_punct = $line =~ /(\w+)/g;
#or this
my @no_punct = grep{$_}split /\W|\s/, $line;
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will work.

-InjunJoel