Question

Here’s the problem:

split=re.compile('\\W*') 

This regular expression works fine when dealing with regular words, but there are occasions where I need the expression to include words like käyttäj&aml;auml;.

What should I add to the regex to include the & and ; characters?

Answer 1

You probably want to take the problem reverse, i.e. finding all the character without the spaces:

[^ \t\n]* 

Or you want to add the extra characters:

[a-zA-Z0-9&;]* 

In case you want to match HTML entities, you should try something like:

(\w+|&\w+;)*