PHP regular expression to match words

If you just want to add an asterisk after each "word" you could do this:

<?php
$test = 'one "two" (three) -four-';

echo preg_replace('/(\w+)/', "$1*", $test);
?>

http://phpfiddle.org/main/code/8nr-bpb

You can use a negative lookahead to split on word boundaries, like this:

$array = preg_split( '/(?!\w)\b/', 'one "two" (three) -four-');

A print_r( $array); gives you the exact output desired:

Array
(
    [0] => one
    [1] =>  "two
    [2] => " (three
    [3] => ) -four
    [4] => -
)

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