Unicode collation is hard

Raymond Chen

The principle of “garbage in, garbage out” applies to Unicode collation. If you hand it a meaningless string and ask to compare it to another meaningless string, you get meaningless results.

I am not a Unicode expert; I just play one on the web. A real Unicode expert is Michael Kaplan, whose explanation of how comparing invalid Unicode strings result in nonsensical results I strongly recommend to those who attempt to generate random test strings in Unicode.

Raymond Chen

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