macOS Ventura: strange Korean chars in Spotlight metadata of native Apple apps

I’m korean and I bet they are just initialisms for searching purposes. When I want to open “safari”, instead of typing the whole word (사파리), I can just type in the initials “ㅅㅍㄹ” and safari will be searched. I can see apple implementing such feature via keywords as korean initials logics are not very useful aside from korea.

As qrian said – they’re abbreviations.

They’re repeated to cover the different ways typing them might get encoded.

Hangul writing combines all the characters in a syllable into one block. The keywords are the first character in each block.

EG: Safari is 사파리. You’d usually type ㅅㅏㅍㅏㄹㅣ and have the input method combine things according to the 'rules'.

ㅅㅍㄹ breaks the rules, so the IME might end up encoding ㅅㅍㄹ as three blocks, or as one.

No font in the world is going to know how to make ᄉᄑᄅ actually fit in one block, but it’s valid, distinct unicode, and it’ll get treated as one thing for selections and cursor movement.

(Modern Korean has clear rules about what valid syllables there are, but old Korean doesn’t always follow them, so unicode doesn’t enforce it)

Try this Terminal command to check your system:

   s=/System; a=/Applications; for app in Safari Keynote TextEdit FaceTime Calculator Stocks; do [[ -d $a/$app.app ]] && p=$a || p=$s$a ; echo "$app: $(mdls -raw -name kMDItemKeywords $p/$app.app)"; done