Normalization is a process that involves transforming characters and sequences of characters into a formally-defined underlying representation. This process is most important when text needs to be compared for sorting and searching, but it is also used when storing text to ensure that the text is stored in a consistent representation.
The Unicode Consortium has defined a number of normalization forms reflecting the various needs of applications:
The different forms are defined in terms of a set of transformations on the text, transformations that are expressed by both an algorithm and a set of data files.
The following constants define the normalization form used by the normalizer: