Split string into words with whitespace unless in between a pair of double quotation marks

A solution :

var str = 'get "something" from "any site"';
var tokens = [].concat.apply([], str.split('"').map(function(v,i){
   return i%2 ? v : v.split(' ')
})).filter(Boolean);

Result :

["get", "something", "from", "any site"]

It's probably possible to do simpler. The idea here is to split using " and then split by the space the odd results of the first splitting.

If you want to keep the quotes, you may use

var tokens = [].concat.apply([], str.split('"').map(function(v,i){
     return i%2 ? '"'+v+'"' : v.split(' ')
})).filter(Boolean);

Result :

['get', '"something"', 'from', '"any site"']

Here is how to do it with a regular expression:

("\[a-zA-Z\s\]+"|\[a-zA-Z\]+)/g : Explanation of the expression is at the link.

Here is how you would use it:

var re = /([a-zA-Z]+)|("[a-zA-Z\s]+"?)\s?/g; 
var str = 'get "something" from "any site"';
var match = re.exec(str);
alert(match[1]); \\ this will give you the first matched group
                   \\ in this case it would be the word "get"