Run your HTML file through od or some other tool that displays the numerical value of each character. My guess (possibly wrong) is that it's the non-breaking space character, which is not matched by \s (and shouldn't be, in my opinion).
Jeff japhy Pinyan,
P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.:
Perl,
regex,
and perlhacker How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart