What are the advantages and disadvantages of using word boundaries in PHP regular expressions for word extraction?

When extracting words from a string using regular expressions in PHP, using word boundaries (\b) can help ensure that only complete words are matched. This can prevent partial matches and improve the accuracy of word extraction. However, word boundaries may not be necessary in all cases and could potentially limit the flexibility of the regex pattern.

// Example of extracting words from a string using word boundaries
$string = "Hello, this is a sample string with words to extract.";
$pattern = "/\b\w+\b/";
preg_match_all($pattern, $string, $matches);
print_r($matches[0]);