How can I split correctly a string containing a sentence with special chars using whitespaces as separator ?
Using regex split method I cannot obtain the desired result.

Example code:

```
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import re

s="La felicità è tutto" # "The happiness is everything" in italian
l=re.compile("(\W)").split(s)

print " s> "+s
print " wordlist> "+str(l)
for i in l:
    print " word> "+i

```

The output is :

```
 s> La felicità è tutto
 wordlist> ['La', ' ', 'felicit', '\xc3', '', '\xa0', '', ' ', '', '\xc3', '', '\xa8', '', ' ', 'tutto']
 word> La
 word>  
 word> felicit
 word> Ã
 word> 
 word> ?
 word> 
 word>  
 word> 
 word> Ã
 word> 
 word> ?
 word> 
 word>  
 word> tutto

```

while I'm looking for an output like:

```
 s> La felicità è tutto
 wordlist> ['La', ' ', 'felicità', ' ', 'è', ' ', 'tutto']
 word> La
 word>  
 word> felicità
 word>  
 word> è
 word>  
 word> tutto

```

To be noted that s is a string that is returned from another method so I cannot force the encoding like

```
s=u"La felicità è tutto"

```

On official python documentation of Unicode and reg-ex I haven't found a satisfactory explanation.

Thanks.

Alessandro