The regex you're using is matching a "word character", i.e. any alphanumeric character and underscore, or a single quote, and as much of them in a row as possible. If you want it to match also a dash, you should say so:

$string =~ /((\w|'|-)+)/g
[download]

But that's bit un-regex-like. You should use a character class in this situation:

$string =~ /([-\w']+)/g
[download]

But this also matches dashes and apostrophes at the beginnings or ends of words, which may or may not be what you want. If not, you could force that a dash or apostrophe is between alphanumeric characters:

$string =~ /(\w+[-']?\w+)/g
[download]

But this has the unwanted effect that a word is at least 2 characters. So we can add an alternation, saying that we also allow a single character word (or number) if we can't match a word consisting of an alphanumerics with a dash or apostrophe between them:

$string =~ /(\w+[-']?\w+|\w)/g
[download]

A small complete test-case:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

$/ = undef;
my $string = <DATA>;
while ($string =~ /(\w+[-']?\w+|\w)/g) {
        print "Word: <$1>\n";
}
__DATA__
This is a sentence with words that're different from other words.  
They have apostrophes in them (') and dashes, or dash-like characters
(-).
[download]

Try running this code and compare the output with the sentence in the __DATA__ section.

The ultimate guide (in my opinion) on regular expressions is Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd Edition.

Arjen

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