Re: another seemingly simple encoding question

["John D. Burger" <john@xxxxxxxxx>]

This doesn't sound like your problem, but I'll explain the 
normalization issue using Korean as an example, since that seems to be 
your data:  There are codepoints in Unicode both for Hangul and Jamo, 
so a Hangul glyph can be represented either with the single 
corresponding codepoint, or as two or three Jamo codepoints.  A Unicode 
font would display these two alternatives identically.  In any Unicode 
encoding, including UTF8, these two strings would not be byte-for-byte 
identical.  The Unicode normalization forms are four algorithms for 
normalizing the strings in such a way that they do compare identically.

Anyway, it sounds like you have the opposite problem, two strings that 
are comparing equal when you think they shouldn't.  I don't know that 
anyone can help you unless you post an actual example of two such 
strings.

- John D. Burger
  MITRE