strsplit on all spaces and punctuation except apostrophes [duplicate]

Answer 1

You could use a negative lookahead (?!'):

strsplit(x, "(\\s+)|(?!')(?=[[:punct:]])", perl = TRUE)
#  [1] "Raptors" "don't"   "like"    "robots"  "!"       ""        "I'd"     "pay"     "$"       "500"     "."       "00"      "to"      "rid"     "them"    "."