re.finditer() skips unicode into selection

[akshay.ksth at gmail.com]

I am using the following Highlighter class for Spell Checking to work on my QTextEdit.

class Highlighter(QSyntaxHighlighter):
    pattern = ur'\w+'
    def __init__(self, *args):
        QSyntaxHighlighter.__init__(self, *args)
        self.dict = None

    def setDict(self, dict):
        self.dict = dict

    def highlightBlock(self, text):
        if not self.dict:
            return
        text = unicode(text)
        format = QTextCharFormat()
        format.setUnderlineColor(Qt.red)
        format.setUnderlineStyle(QTextCharFormat.SpellCheckUnderline)
        unicode_pattern=re.compile(self.pattern,re.UNICODE|re.LOCALE)

        for word_object in unicode_pattern.finditer(text):
            if not self.dict.spell(word_object.group()):
                print word_object.group()
                self.setFormat(word_object.start(), word_object.end() - word_object.start(), format)

But whenever I pass unicode values into my QTextEdit the re.finditer() does not seem to collect it.

When I pass "I am a नेपाली" into the QTextEdit. The output is like this:

    I I I a I am I am I am a I am a I am a I am a I am a I am a I am a I am a

It is completely ignoring the unicode. What might be the issue. I am new to PyQt and regex. Im using Python 2.7 and PyQt4.