How to write Python regular expression to get zero or more occurrences within the pattern?

*      An asterisk meta-character  in a regular expression indicates 0 or more occurrences of the pattern to its left

The following code matches and prints the zero or more occurrences of the pattern '\w' in the string 'chihua huahua'

Example

import re
s = 'chihua huahua'
result = re.findall(r'\w*', s)
print result

Output

This gives the output

['chihua', '', 'huahua', '']