Here's a regex that should get you started: /("[^"]*"|[^\s"]+)/g; This regex makes two following assumptions: a word is a sequence of non-whitespace, non-quote characters, and a quotation cannot contain embedded quotes. Here's an example:

sub split_text {
  $_[0] =~ /("[^"]*"|[^\s"]+)/g;
}

my $text = 'The dog said "Hi, how are you?"  I laughed.';

my @pieces = split_text($text);

print "$_\n" for @pieces;

__END__
The
dog
said
"Hi, how are you?"
I
laughed.
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