regex - PHP regular expression to match words -

regex - PHP regular expression to match words -

ok, i've been wrestling regex ages , can't work.

what want do:

given string want array of strings containing words, each preceded non-word characters.

example input string:

one "two" (three) -four-

the words in string may anything, gibberish, amount of punctuation or symbols.

what see:

array: 1 "two " (three ) -four -

essentially, each match lastly thing word, preceded left on previous match.

as noted in questions title using in php, have tried various combinations of preg_match_all() , preg_split(), patterns containing many variations of "\w", "\b", "[^\w]" , on.

the bigger picture

essentially want place * after each word in string searching purposes.

i not regex person, help appreciated!

if want add together asterisk after each "word" this:

<?php $test = 'one "two" (three) -four-'; echo preg_replace('/(\w+)/', "$1*", $test); ?>

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

php regex