I needed a function similar to Perl's qw. If you pass a string to this function it will return an array of the words, stripping any separating whitespace. If you pass true as the second parameter you will instead get a hash returning each word in a key/value pair.

function qw($str,$return_hash = false) {
    $str = trim($str);

    // Word characters are any printable char
    $words = str_word_count($str,1,"!\"#$%&'()*+,./0123456789-:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~");

    if ($return_hash) {
        $ret = array();
        $num = sizeof($words);

        // Odd number of elements, can't build a hash
        if ($num % 2 == 1) {
            return array();
        } else {
            // Loop over each word and build a key/value hash
            for ($i = 0; $i < $num; $i += 2) {
                $key   = $words[$i];
                $value = $words[$i + 1];

                $ret[$key] = $value;
            }

            return $ret;
        }
    } else {
        return $words;
    }
}

This is useful in the following scenarios:

$str  = "Leonardo    Donatello    Michelangelo    Raphael";
$tmnt = qw($str);

$str = "
    Leonardo       Blue
    Donatello      Purple
    Michelangelo   Orange
    Raphael        Red
";
$turtles = qw($str,true);

Here is a similar function written in Python 3.x:

xarray = qw("reg blue green orange yellow")

def qw(xstr):
    ret = xstr.strip().split()

    return ret