When listing files by name, should 20test.text come before or after 200test.text? Which order is the more ‘natural’? How this quickly becomes complex.
normalisation
B+trees, directory records, directory and file names and Unicode normalisation, and whatever happened to the promise of fast directory sizing?
How can you have two volumes in the same APFS container with identical names? How does macOS handle the conflicts?
Don’t use Unicode normalised Form C names for volumes in Disk Utility, as they cause havoc, and prevent Spotlight from indexing volumes.
How Café and Café are actually different, and only one of those can be a filename in macOS, despite APFS being a non-normalising file system.
Normalises strings to any of the four standard Unicode normalisation forms C, D, KC or KD, supplied with source.
How to hide text so that it can’t be searched or analysed, and how file naming almost brought APFS down.
Universal App which gives deep insight into Unicode normalisation problems, string comparison, and more.
Open a PDF document, select a URL within it and Copy. Then paste it into a webpage for publication. Simple – but the URL then broke. Why?
Use Finder aliases at the command line, compare extended attributes of two files, and normalise Unicode strings.
The Eclectic Light Company 