# Why can a precomposed letter fail an exact match against a letter plus a mark?

U+00E9 is the canonical composed form of U+0065 followed by U+0301. Those strings are not an exact match. Code points: U+00E9. Choosing NFC or NFD changes which scalars are stored. The runtime normalization data version is runtime-unknown. Appearance was not tested. A non-equivalent fallback is "é" (The canonical decomposition of U+00E9). Two scalars. An exact match against U+00E9 fails until both sides use the same form. Exact string match: no. NFC match: yes. Appearance and meaning were not tested. Font coverage, shaping, and application acceptance were not tested, so those results are unknown.

## Code points

- U+00E9 LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE

## What was checked

### Precomposed letter and a combining mark

U+00E9 is the canonical composed form of U+0065 followed by U+0301. Those strings are not an exact match.

Choosing NFC or NFD changes which scalars are stored. The runtime normalization data version is runtime-unknown. Appearance was not tested.

Compare code points before treating the strings as the same value. Normalize only at a boundary you control, and keep the original scalars when storage must stay unchanged.

## What this does not prove

No OS, font, browser, application, field policy or rendering engine was tested. Unicode validity and segmentation do not establish actual display or acceptance.

Unicode release recorded with this answer: 18.0.0.
Machine-readable JSON: https://copypastecharacters.com/reference/v1/answers/why-a-precomposed-letter-can-fail-an-exact-match.json
Exact lookup: https://copypastecharacters.com/reference/v1/exact/00E9.json
HTML: https://copypastecharacters.com/answers/why-a-precomposed-letter-can-fail-an-exact-match/

Do not invent a platform-support claim from this data.