normalize which transforms Unicode
text into an equivalent composed or decomposed form, allowing for easier
sorting and searching of text.
The normalize method supports the standard normalization forms
described in
Unicode Standard Annex #15 — Unicode Normalization Forms.
Characters with accents or other adornments can be encoded in several different ways in Unicode. For example, take the character A-acute. In Unicode, this can be encoded as a single character (the "composed" form):
U+00C1 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE
or as two separate characters (the "decomposed" form):
U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT
To a user of your program, however, both of these sequences should be
treated as the same "user-level" character "A with acute accent". When you
are searching or comparing text, you must ensure that these two sequences are
treated as equivalent. In addition, you must handle characters with more than
one accent. Sometimes the order of a character's combining accents is
significant, while in other cases accent sequences in different orders are
really equivalent.
Similarly, the string "ffi" can be encoded as three separate letters:
U+0066 LATIN SMALL LETTER F
U+0066 LATIN SMALL LETTER F
U+0069 LATIN SMALL LETTER I
or as the single character
U+FB03 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI
The ffi ligature is not a distinct semantic character, and strictly speaking
it shouldn't be in Unicode at all, but it was included for compatibility
with existing character sets that already provided it. The Unicode standard
identifies such characters by giving them "compatibility" decompositions
into the corresponding semantic characters. When sorting and searching, you
will often want to use these mappings.
The normalize method helps solve these problems by transforming
text into the canonical composed and decomposed forms as shown in the first
example above. In addition, you can have it perform compatibility
decompositions so that you can treat compatibility characters the same as
their equivalents.
Finally, the normalize method rearranges accents into the
proper canonical order, so that you do not have to worry about accent
rearrangement on your own.
The W3C generally recommends to exchange texts in NFC. Note also that most legacy character encodings use only precomposed forms and often do not encode any combining marks by themselves. For conversion to such character encodings the Unicode text needs to be normalized to NFC. For more usage examples, see the Unicode Standard Annex.
- Since:
- 1.6
- External Specifications
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Nested Class Summary
Nested ClassesModifier and TypeClassDescriptionstatic enumThis enum provides constants of the four Unicode normalization forms that are described in Unicode Standard Annex #15 — Unicode Normalization Forms and two methods to access them. -
Method Summary
Modifier and TypeMethodDescriptionstatic booleanisNormalized(CharSequence src, Normalizer.Form form) Determines if the given sequence of char values is normalized.static Stringnormalize(CharSequence src, Normalizer.Form form) Normalize a sequence of char values.
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Method Details
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normalize
Normalize a sequence of char values. The sequence will be normalized according to the specified normalization form.- Parameters:
src- The sequence of char values to normalize.form- The normalization form; one ofNormalizer.Form.NFC,Normalizer.Form.NFD,Normalizer.Form.NFKC,Normalizer.Form.NFKD- Returns:
- The normalized String
- Throws:
NullPointerException- Ifsrcorformis null.
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isNormalized
Determines if the given sequence of char values is normalized.- Parameters:
src- The sequence of char values to be checked.form- The normalization form; one ofNormalizer.Form.NFC,Normalizer.Form.NFD,Normalizer.Form.NFKC,Normalizer.Form.NFKD- Returns:
- true if the sequence of char values is normalized; false otherwise.
- Throws:
NullPointerException- Ifsrcorformis null.
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