title: Python: any way to perform this "hybrid" split() on multi-lingual (e.g. Chinese & English) strings?
body: <p>I have strings that are multi-lingual consist of both languages that use whitespace as word separator (English, French, etc) and languages that don't (Chinese, Japanese, Korean).</p>
  
  <p>Given such a string, I want to separate the English/French/etc part into words using whitespace as separator, and to separate the Chinese/Japanese/Korean part into individual characters.</p>
  
  <p>And I want to put of all those separated components into a list.</p>
  
  <p>Some examples would probably make this clear:</p>
  
  <p><strong>Case 1</strong>: English-only string. This case is easy:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; "I love Python".split()
  ['I', 'love', 'Python']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>Case 2</strong>: Chinese-only string:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; list(u"我爱蟒蛇")
  [u'\u6211', u'\u7231', u'\u87d2', u'\u86c7']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In this case I can turn the string into a list of Chinese characters. But within the list I'm getting unicode representations:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[u'\u6211', u'\u7231', u'\u87d2', u'\u86c7']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How do I get it to display the actual characters instead of the unicode? Something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>['我', '爱', '蟒', '蛇']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>??</p>
  
  <p><strong>Case 3</strong>: A mix of English &amp; Chinese:</p>
  
  <p>I want to turn an input string such as</p>
  
  <pre><code>"我爱Python"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and turns it into a list like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>['我', '爱', 'Python']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is it possible to do something like that?</p>