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Comment by ddebernardy | Hacker News Reader

This is misinformation. OP's strings are just wrong...

    >> "\u0308"
    => "̈"
    >> "\u00eb"
    => "ë"
    >> "noe\u0308l"
    => "noël"
    >> "no\u00ebl"
    => "noël"

His noël examples work just fine if you don't copy/paste the string he posts, and instead type them in like I just did.

If anything, languages are reporting correct reverses and length, since he's really manipulating 5 characters rather than four.

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Congratulations, you've discovered unicode composition!

  2.0.0p247 :045 > Unicode::compose("e\u0308").unpack('U').first.to_s(16)
   => "eb" 
  2.0.0p247 :046 > Unicode::compose("\u00eb").unpack('U').first.to_s(16)
   => "eb" 
  2.0.0p247 :047 > Unicode::decompose("e\u0308").unpack('U').first.to_s(16)
   => "65" 
  2.0.0p247 :048 > Unicode::decompose("\u00eb").unpack('U').first.to_s(16)
   => "65"

I presume the ones you pasted in were changed by the browser. His examples are not wrong at all, indeed how can a string be "wrong"?

His example is "wrong" in the sense that you cannot reasonably complain that "noe¨l" gets reversed to "l¨eon" and put the "¨" part on top of the "l" when it does — which seems entirely correct. Or for that matter, that the string's length is 5 when there are indeed 5 characters.

As for being changed by the browser, the latter (or rather the OS) copied what there was, and the OS pasted it verbatim insofar as I can tell.

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