Normalize Unicode Text

Unicode allows some characters to be represented in multiple ways. For example, the letter "é" can be stored as a single precomposed character (U+00E9) or as two characters: "e" followed by a combining accent (U+0065 + U+0301). These look identical but are different byte sequences, causing string comparisons to fail, search to miss results, and databases to store duplicates. Normalization converts text to a consistent single form so it behaves predictably.

NFC (Canonical Decomposition followed by Canonical Composition) — the standard for web and most modern systems. Prefers single composed characters. NFD (Canonical Decomposition) — decomposes characters into base + combining marks. Used in some file systems (macOS HFS+). NFKC (Compatibility Decomposition + Composition) — like NFC but also converts compatibility characters: fi → fi, ① → 1, ½ → 1/2, and fancy Unicode fonts → plain ASCII. Recommended for search indexing and databases. NFKD — the decomposed version of NFKC.

Fancy Unicode text uses characters from Unicode's Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block (U+1D400–U+1D7FF) which were originally designed for mathematical notation — bold, italic, script, fraktur, double-struck, monospace, sans-serif. Because they're actual Unicode code points (not formatting), they can be pasted anywhere plain text is accepted — social media bios, usernames, LinkedIn headlines, Twitter names. This tool converts them back to regular A-Z letters so they work in databases, search engines, and accessibility tools.

Diacritics are accent marks added to letters — é, ü, ñ, ç, ă, ș, and hundreds more. Removing them converts accented characters to their base ASCII equivalents: café → cafe, résumé → resume, naïve → naive, Ångström → Angstrom. This is useful when preparing text for systems that only support ASCII, creating URL slugs, or normalizing names for matching. The tool uses NFD decomposition to separate base letters from combining marks, then strips the marks.

The tool detects and removes: Zero-Width Space (U+200B), Zero-Width Non-Joiner (U+200C), Zero-Width Joiner (U+200D), Byte Order Mark (U+FEFF), Soft Hyphen (U+00AD), Left-to-Right Mark (U+200E), Right-to-Left Mark (U+200F), and other formatting-only characters. These appear commonly in AI-generated text (used as watermarks), text copied from web pages, and PDFs. They're invisible but can cause search failures, database mismatches, and encoding errors.

Ligatures are single Unicode characters that represent two or more letters merged together — fi (fi), ff (ff), ffi (ffi), ffl (ffl), st (st), Æ (AE), and others. PDFs and some fonts emit these as single characters when you copy text, causing word searches to miss them (searching "office" won't find "office"). Expanding ligatures splits them back into individual letters, making the text fully searchable and compatible.

No. All processing runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Your text never leaves your device and is never transmitted to LazyTools or any third party. This makes it safe to use with confidential documents, customer data, proprietary content, or any sensitive text.