PHP explode the string, but treat words in quotes as a single word

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You could use a preg_match_all(...):

$text="Lorem ipsum "dolor sit amet" consectetur "adipiscing \\"elit" dolor";
preg_match_all("https://stackoverflow.com/"(?:\\\\.|[^\\\\"])*"|\S+/', $text, $matches);
print_r($matches);

which will produce:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => Lorem
            [1] => ipsum
            [2] => "dolor sit amet"
            [3] => consectetur
            [4] => "adipiscing \"elit"
            [5] => dolor
        )

)

And as you can see, it also accounts for escaped quotes inside quoted strings.

EDIT

A short explanation:

"           # match the character '"'
(?:         # start non-capture group 1 
  \\        #   match the character '\'
  .         #   match any character except line breaks
  |         #   OR
  [^\\"]    #   match any character except '\' and '"'
)*          # end non-capture group 1 and repeat it zero or more times
"           # match the character '"'
|           # OR
\S+         # match a non-whitespace character: [^\s] and repeat it one or more times

And in case of matching %22 instead of double quotes, you’d do:

preg_match_all('/%22(?:\\\\.|(?!%22).)*%22|\S+/', $text, $matches);

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