I wrote an article on Unicode and NSString for this month’s issue of objc.io, which is all about strings in Cocoa. It’s a complex topic, and my article alone is more than 5,000 words long, so thank you in advance for investing the time to read it. I hope you will learn something new, as I certainly did by writing it.

Although Unicode is more than 20 years old already and an established standard, I still encounter seemingly simple text handling bugs in apps and websites. As developers, we owe everybody in the world to thoroughly unit test our string handling routines, and that means testing it with other scripts than English.