Apologies if you perceived my answer as being patronizing.

If you want to split your text into words AND keep the spaces, split might be an alternative. Using a capture group in the regex in split, the delimiters are not discarded. So splitting on words will give you the words and the characters inbetween:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my $text = <<EOTEXT;
This is a word.
Here is another sentence.
EOTEXT

my @words = split /\b(\w+)\b/, $text;
print Dumper \@words;
[download]

results in

$VAR1 = [
          '',
          'This',
          ' ',
          'is',
          ' ',
          'a',
          ' ',
          'word',
          '.
',
          'Here',
          ' ',
          'is',
          ' ',
          'another',
          ' ',
          'sentence',
          '.
'
        ];
[download]

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