title: Matching only a unicode letter in Python re
body: <p>I have a string from which i want to extract 3 groups:</p>
  
  <pre><code>'19 janvier 2012' -&gt; '19', 'janvier', '2012'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Month name could contain non ASCII characters, so <code>[A-Za-z]</code> does not work for me:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import re
  &gt;&gt;&gt; re.search(ur'(\d{,2}) ([A-Za-z]+) (\d{4})', u'20 janvier 2012', re.UNICODE).groups()
  (u'20', u'janvier', u'2012')
  &gt;&gt;&gt; re.search(ur'(\d{,2}) ([A-Za-z]+) (\d{4})', u'20 février 2012', re.UNICODE).groups()
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
  AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'groups'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I could use <code>\w</code> but it matches digits and underscore:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; re.search(ur'(\w+)', u'février', re.UNICODE).groups()
  (u'f\xe9vrier',)
  &gt;&gt;&gt; re.search(ur'(\w+)', u'fé_q23vrier', re.UNICODE).groups()
  (u'f\xe9_q23vrier',)
  &gt;&gt;&gt; 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried to use <a href="http://www.regular-expressions.info/posixbrackets.html#class" rel="noreferrer">[:alpha:]</a>, but it's not working:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; re.search(ur'[:alpha:]+', u'février', re.UNICODE).groups()
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
  AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'groups'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If i could somehow match <code>\w</code> without <code>[_0-9]</code>, but i don't know how. And even if i find out how to do this, is there a ready shortcut like <code>[:alpha:]</code> which works in Python?</p>