Regular expression for selecting single spaced phrases but not whitespace - regex

Question

I need a rather complicated regular expression that will select words with one space between them and that can include the '-' symbol in them, it should not however select continuous whitespace.
'KENEDY JOHN G JR E' 'example' 'D-54'
I have tried the following regular expression:
\'([\s\w-]+)\'
but it selects continuous whitespace which I don't want it to do.
I want the expression to select
'KENEDY JOHN G JR E'
'example'
'D-54'

Answer 1

Perhaps,
\'([\w-]+(?:\s[\w-]+)*)\'
?
EDIT
If leading/trailing dashes (on the word boundaries) are not allowed, this should read:
/\'(\w+(?:[\s-]\w+)*)\'/

Answer 2

An expression like this should do it:
'[\w-]+(?:\s[\w-]+)*'

Answer 3

Try this:
my $data = "'KENEDY JOHN G JR E' 'example' 'D-54'";
# Sets of
# one or more word characters or dash
# followed by an optional space
# enclosed in single quotes
#
# The outermost ()s are optional. There just
# so i can print the match easily as $1.
while ($data =~ /(\'([\w-]+\s?)+\')/g)
{
print $1, "\n";
}
outputs
'KENEDY JOHN G JR E'
'example'
'D-54'

Answer 4

Not sure if this applies to you, since you asked for a regex specifically. However, if you want strings separated by two or more whitespace or dashes, you can use split
use strict;
use warnings;
use v5.10;
my $str = q('KENEDY JOHN G JR E' 'example' 'D-54');
my #match = split /\s{2,}/, $str;
say for #match;
A regex with similar functionality would be
my #match = $str =~ /(.*?)(?:\s{2,}|$)/g;
Note that you'll need the edge case of finding end of line $.
The benefit of using split or the wildcard . is that you rely on whitespace to define your fields, not the content of the fields themselves.

Answer 5

Your code actually works as is.
use feature qw( say );
$_ = "'KENEDY JOHN G JR E' 'example' 'D-54'";
say for /\'([\s\w-]+)\'/g;
output:
KENEDY JOHN G JR E
example
D-54
(Move the parens if you want the quotes too.)
I would simply use
my #data = /'([^']*)'/g;
If you have any validation to do, do it afterwards.