You need to escape (replace * with \*) all the stars that are used as separators. Otherwise, the regexp engine will take them to mean "the previous element can repeat 0 or more times".

Something like this might be closer:

/^(.*?)\*(.*?)\*(.*?)\*(.*?)\*(.*?)\*(.*?)\*(.*?)\*(.*?)$/
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As for the second part of the question: You are using essentialy the correct method, but instead of pushing $1 into an array, and then iterating over that array, you can just assign to the has right at the point where you do the push now.