java - Resetting fancy font to normal

Question

I have a String named fancy, the String fancy is this "????????", however, I need to make "lmao" out of it.

I've tried calling String#trim, however with no success.

Example code:

var fancy = "????????"
var normal = //Magic to convert ???????? to lmao

EDIT: So I figured out, if I take the UTF-8 code of this fancy character, and subtract it by 120101, I get the original character, however, there are more types of these fancy texts so it does not seem like a solution for my problem.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65852802/resetting-fancy-font-to-normal

Answer 1

You can take advantage of the fact that your "??" character decomposes to a regular "a":

Decomposition LATIN SMALL LETTER A (U+0061)

Java's java.text.Normalizer class contains different normalizer forms. The NKFD and NKFC forms use the above decomposition rule.

String normal = Normalizer.normalize(fancy, Normalizer.Form.NFKC);

Using compatibility equivalence is what you need here:

Compatibility equivalence is a weaker type of equivalence between characters or sequences of characters which represent the same abstract character (or sequence of abstract characters), but which may have distinct visual appearances or behaviors.

(The reason you do not lose diacritics is because this process simply separates these diacritic marks from their base letters - and then re-combines them if you use the relevant form.)