{"id":5782,"date":"2012-06-29T18:30:12","date_gmt":"2012-06-29T13:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/?p=5782"},"modified":"2014-12-17T09:14:34","modified_gmt":"2014-12-17T03:44:34","slug":"normalization-forms-for-accented-characters-in-java","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/normalization-forms-for-accented-characters-in-java\/","title":{"rendered":"Normalization Forms for Accented Characters in Java"},"content":{"rendered":"

Text Normalization is the process of “standardizing” text to a certain form, so as to enable, searching, indexing and other types of analytical processing on it. Often working with large quantities of text we encounter character with accents like \u00e9 , \u00e2 <\/strong>etc. Unicode provides multiple ways to create such characters . For example we can have \u00e9<\/strong> created using Unicode sequence \\u00E9 (composite character) or we can create it using a combination of e + acute accent. that would be (e + \\u0301).
\nNow the \u00e9<\/strong> created would look same in both the representations and would also mean the same thing, but for a java program they are actually not the same characters so the \u00e9 <\/strong>created using the two methods are actually not equal for your program. Clearly we need to normalize these two different representations to a fixed standard.<\/p>\n

And its here, that java.text.Normalizer <\/strong>class comes to our rescue. All we need to do is normalize things to a normalization form out of these 4 :<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. NFC \u2013 Canonical Decomposition, followed by Canonical Composition.<\/li>\n
  2. NFD \u2013 Canonical Decomposition<\/li>\n
  3. NFKC \u2013 Compatibility Decomposition, followed by Canonical Composition<\/li>\n
  4. NFKD \u2013 Compatibility Decomposition<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \n\tCanonical Decomposition means, taking a character and decomposing it into its component characters<\/p>\n

    \n\tCompatibility decomposition means taking a character and decomposing it by compatibility and arranging them in specific order
    \n
    \n\tCanonical Composition means recomposing characters based on their canonical equivalence.<\/strong>
    \n
    \nCanonical equivalence <\/strong>further means that characters have the same appearance and meaning when printed or displayed.
    \n
    \nTo Fully summarize this in an example,
    \nConsider, the Angstrom sign “\u00c5”, <\/strong> (U+212B)<\/strong> and \u00a0the Swedish letter “\u00c5”<\/strong> (U+00C5), <\/strong> both are expanded by NFD (or NFKD) into “A”<\/strong> and “\u00b0”<\/strong> (U+0041 and U+030A) <\/strong> which is then reduced by NFC (or NFKC) to the Swedish letter “\u00c5”<\/strong> (U+00C5) \u00a0(<\/strong>Swedish Letter “\u00c5”<\/strong> is canonically equivalent to Angstrom sign “\u00c5”<\/strong> as they are printed and displayed as exactly same, though they are different)<\/strong>.
    \n<\/p>\n

    Now we know how we can normalize unicode characters to a standard form wherever required.<\/p>\n

    \nSachin Anand<\/p>\n

    @babasachinanand<\/p>\n

    sachin[at]intelligrape[dot]com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Text Normalization is the process of “standardizing” text to a certain form, so as to enable, searching, indexing and other types of analytical processing on it. Often working with large quantities of text we encounter character with accents like \u00e9 , \u00e2 etc. Unicode provides multiple ways to create such characters . For example we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":19,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[833,4844,832,834,831],"class_list":["post-5782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-accented-characters","tag-java","tag-normalization-forms","tag-normalize-text","tag-text-normalization"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t