The nestedquotewords() and quotewords() functions accept a delimiter (which can be a regular expression) and a list of lines and then breaks those lines up into a list of words ignoring delimiters that appear inside quotes. quotewords() returns all of the tokens in a single long list, while nestedquotewords() returns a list of token lists corresponding to the elements of @lines. parseline() does tokenizing on a single string. The quotewords() functions simply call &parseline(), so if you're only splitting one line you can call parse_line() directly and save a function call.