textanalytics.unicode.nfd

Strings that look identical can have different underlying representations. The Unicode canonical decomposition form (NFD) ensures that equivalent strings have a unique binary representation.

Consider the string "jalapeño" which contains 8 letters.

str = "jalapeño";
strlength(str)

ans = 
8

Normalize the string using the textanalytics.unicode.nfd function. On some systems, the output string appears to be identical to the input string.

newStr = textanalytics.unicode.nfd(str)

newStr = 
"jalapeño"

View the number of code points in the new string. The normalized representation includes one extra code point. In this case, the function splits the accented letter "ñ" into two separate code points.

strlength(newStr)

ans = 
9

Extract the seventh and eighth code points in the normalized string. On some systems, the output appears to be a single character.

extractBetween(newStr,7,8)

ans = 
"ñ"

Check whether the strings str and newStr are equal using the == operator. The operator returns 0 because the strings have different underlying representations.

tf = str == newStr

tf = logical
   0