The $keep argument is a boolean flag. If true, the quotes are kept with each word, otherwise quotes are stripped in the splitting process. $keep also defines whether unprotected backslashes are retained.
A &shellwords() replacement is included to demonstrate the new package. This version differs from the original in that it will _NOT_ default to using $_ if no arguments are given. I personally find the old behavior to be a mis-feature.
"ewords() works by simply jamming all of @lines into a single string in $_ and then pulling off words a bit at a time until $_ is exhausted.
The inner ``for'' loop builds up each word (or $field) one $snippet at a time. A $snippet is a quoted string, a backslashed character, or an unquoted string. We fall out of the ``for'' loop when we reach the end of $_ or when we hit a delimiter. Falling out of the ``for'' loop, we push the $field we've been building up onto the list of @words we'll be returning, and then loop back and pull another word off of $_ .
The first two cases inside the ``for'' loop deal with quoted strings. The first case matches a double quoted string, removes it from $_ , and assigns the double quoted string to $snippet in the body of the conditional. The second case handles single quoted strings. In the third case we've found a quote at the current beginning of $_ , but it didn't match the quoted string regexps in the first two cases, so it must be an unbalanced quote and we croak with an error (which can be caught by eval() ).
The next case handles backslashed characters, and the next case is the exit case on reaching the end of the string or finding a delimiter.
Otherwise, we've found an unquoted thing and we pull of characters one at a time until we reach something that could start another $snippet-- a quote of some sort, a backslash, or the delimiter. This one character at a time behavior was necessary if the delimiter was going to be a regexp (love to hear it if you can figure out a better way).
Basically an update and generalization of the old shellwords.pl. Much code shamelessly stolen from the old version (author unknown).