i cannot extract asterisks with my regular expression duplicate

We can use \\S+ as pattern to match one or more non-whitespace character

library(stringr)
str_extract(str1, "\\S+\\s+\\S+\\s+\\S+")
#[1] "*** CONNECTION WAS"

str_extract(str2, "\\S+\\s+\\S+\\s+\\S+")
#[1] "some random example"

str_extract(str3, "\\S+\\s+\\S+\\s+\\S+")
#[1] "response message: <?xml"

According to ?regex

The symbol \w matches a ‘word’ character (a synonym for [[:alnum:]_], an extension)

Thus, it matches only the alphanumeric characters along with _ and not *. Also, the * in regex implies metacharacter that signifies zero or more

data

str1 <- "*** CONNECTION WAS MADE IN MESSAGE ***"
str2 <- "some random example message"
str3 <- 'response message: <?xml version="1.0" encoding'