regex to include special symbols and foreign language characters

unable to read foreign language characters and special symbols

[phparion]

Hi

I am using the following regex to pull out all the information from a html source code,

preg_match_all("/(\/students\/[-\w]+\/[\d]+\/)/",$rawHtml,$stds);

It works fine but whenever there is a special symbol, which is displayed by pressing ALT and some numbers, or some foreign language characters; this code fails to read that. I will be delighted if anyone could guide me what to add to this regex to enable it to read the special symbols and foreign language characters?

thank you very much

[PHP_Chimp]

The u modifier turns UTF-8 mode on. So would putting the string through as UTF-8 stop the problems with 'strange' characters?