title: Tokenizing in french using nltk
body: <p>I am trying to tokenize french words but when i tokenize french words the words which contain  "^" symbol returns \xe .The following is the code that i implemented
  .</p>
  
  <pre><code>import nltk
  from nltk.tokenize import WhitespaceTokenizer
  from nltk.tokenize import SpaceTokenizer
  from nltk.tokenize import RegexpTokenizer
  data = "Vous êtes au volant d'une voiture et vous roulez à vitesse"
  #wst = WhitespaceTokenizer()
  #tokenizer = RegexpTokenizer('\s+', gaps=True)
  token=WhitespaceTokenizer().tokenize(data)
  print token
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Output i got </p>
  
  <pre><code>['Vous', '\xeates', 'au', 'volant', "d'une", 'voiture', 'et', 'vous', 'roulez', '\xe0', 'vitesse']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Desired output</p>
  
  <pre><code>['Vous', 'êtes', 'au', 'volant', "d'une", 'voiture', 'et', 'vous', 'roulez', 'à', 'vitesse']
  </code></pre>