regex match some special chars

Question

I have a strings like this:

  hello this is my_string is-very-cool & another stuff

How I can explode(?) my string by all special chars but allowing the spaces, - and _ ?

Any Ideas?

Answer 1

preg_split('/[^\w -]/', $string)

This will split on anything that isn't a-z, 0-9, _, - or a space.