Python treats non-breaking space wrong?

[magnus.lycka]

It seems that Python treats non-breaking space (\xa0) as a normal
whitespace character, e.g. when splitting a string. See below:
['hello', 'there']

Surely this is not intended behaviour?

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

It seems that Python treats non-breaking space (\xa0) as a normal
whitespace character, e.g. when splitting a string. See below:
['hello', 'there']

Surely this is not intended behaviour?

Yes it is.

str.split() breaks on whitespace, and \xa0 is whitespace according to the
Unicode standard. To put it another way, str.split() is not a word-
wrapping split. This has been reported before, and rejected as a won't-
fix.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-bugs-list/2006-January/031531.html