title: python, regex split and special character
body: <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>Example code:</p>
  
  <pre><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&gt; "+s
  print " wordlist&gt; "+str(l)
  for i in l:
      print " word&gt; "+i
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The output is :</p>
  
  <pre><code> s&gt; La felicità è tutto
   wordlist&gt; ['La', ' ', 'felicit', '\xc3', '', '\xa0', '', ' ', '', '\xc3', '', '\xa8', '', ' ', 'tutto']
   word&gt; La
   word&gt;  
   word&gt; felicit
   word&gt; Ã
   word&gt; 
   word&gt; ?
   word&gt; 
   word&gt;  
   word&gt; 
   word&gt; Ã
   word&gt; 
   word&gt; ?
   word&gt; 
   word&gt;  
   word&gt; tutto
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>while I'm looking for an output like:</p>
  
  <pre><code> s&gt; La felicità è tutto
   wordlist&gt; ['La', ' ', 'felicità', ' ', 'è', ' ', 'tutto']
   word&gt; La
   word&gt;  
   word&gt; felicità
   word&gt;  
   word&gt; è
   word&gt;  
   word&gt; tutto
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>To be noted that s is a string that is returned from another method so I cannot force the encoding like</p>
  
  <pre><code>s=u"La felicità è tutto"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>On official python documentation of Unicode and reg-ex I haven't found a satisfactory explanation.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>
  
  <p>Alessandro</p>