The specific issue is that -w causes the regex to be wrapped in Unicode
word boundaries. Regrettably, Unicode word boundaries are the one thing
our regex engine can't handle well in the presence of non-ASCII text. We
work around its slowness by stripping word boundaries in some
circumstances, and using the resulting expression as a way to produce match
candidates that are then verified by the full original regex.
This doesn't fix all cases, but it should fix all cases where -w is used.
