As for your second question, just copy/pasting your code and the example text does output the hyphens and dots here. What are you displaying it on?

Also, you might at least want to put some () around the central part of your regex, as in: /\s($c*?)\s/ so you won't capture the whitespace around the matches as you do now. Or maybe that is what you wanted.

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You have moved into a dark place.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.