Given a string, I want an array of strings containing words, each preceded by any non-word characters.
Example input string:
one "two" (three) -four-
The words in the string may be anything, even gibberish, with any amount of punctuation or symbols.
What I would like to see:
array: one "two " (three ) -four -
Essentially, for each match the last thing is a word, preceded by anything left over from the previous match.
I will be using this in PHP. I have tried various combinations of preg_match_all() and preg_split(), with patterns containing many variations of "\w", "\b", "[^\w]" and so on.
The Bigger Picture
How can I place a * after each word in the string for searching purposes?
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);
?>