Latin Accented Characters — Diacritics in Unicode

Latin Accented Characters in Unicode

Accented Latin characters (e.g. é, à, ü, ñ, ç) are among the most common non-ASCII characters in Western languages. Unicode provides two ways to represent them, which creates both flexibility and complexity.

Pre-composed vs. Combining Forms

Unicode offers two representations for the same visual character:

Pre-composed (NFC — Canonical Decomposition followed by Canonical Composition):

• é = U+00E9 (LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE) — single code point, 2 UTF-8 bytes

Combining (NFD — Canonical Decomposition):

• é = U+0065 + U+0301 (LATIN SMALL LETTER E + COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT) — 2 code points, 3 UTF-8 bytes

Both render identically, but they differ in byte representation, string length, and comparison behavior.

Common Accented Characters

Character	Code Point	UTF-8 Bytes	Name
é	U+00E9	C3 A9	LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE
è	U+00E8	C3 A8	LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE
à	U+00E0	C3 A0	LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE
ü	U+00FC	C3 BC	LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
ñ	U+00F1	C3 B1	LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE
ç	U+00E7	C3 A7	LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
ö	U+00F6	C3 B6	LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS
å	U+00E5	C3 A5	LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE
ß	U+00DF	C3 9F	LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S

The Latin-1 Supplement Block

Pre-composed accented characters from Western European languages occupy the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080–U+00FF). These all use exactly 2 bytes in UTF-8, making them more compact than their decomposed equivalents.

Normalization Matters

String comparison and search must account for normalization:

"caf\u00E9" !== "cafe\u0301"  // Different byte sequences!
"caf\u00E9".normalize("NFC") === "cafe\u0301".normalize("NFC")  // true

The Unicode Inspector shows whether your text uses pre-composed or combining forms, helping you diagnose comparison and search failures.

Mojibake

When UTF-8 encoded accented text is read as Latin-1/ISO-8859-1, you get mojibake: é (2 bytes: C3 A9) is misinterpreted as é (two Latin-1 characters). The Unicode Inspector reveals the actual code points in such garbled text, making it easier to identify the encoding mismatch.