What does NFD normalisation do?

NFD stands for Normalization Form D, or Canonical Decomposition. It splits precomposed characters such as e-acute into a base letter and one or more combining marks, then orders those marks canonically.

Why is NFD useful for removing accents?

Once a character is decomposed into a base letter plus combining marks, you can strip the marks by removing the combining diacritical range. This is the standard trick for accent-insensitive search and slug generation.

Does NFD change how the text looks?

No. The decomposed form is canonically equivalent and renders identically. Only the underlying code points change: one precomposed character becomes a base plus combining marks.

Will the code point count usually increase?

Yes. Decomposing typically increases the number of code points because one precomposed character expands into a base plus one or more marks. The before and after counts show the difference.

Is my text sent to a server?

No. The tool uses the browser's native String.prototype.normalize, so decomposition happens locally and your text never leaves the page.

Unicode NFD Decomposer

NFD (Normalization Form D) takes precomposed characters apart, turning a single accented letter into a base letter followed by its combining marks. It is the form you reach for when you need to strip diacritics or compare text without caring about accents. This tool applies NFD and lists the code points before and after.

How it works

NFD performs a canonical decomposition only — there is no recomposition step:

é  (U+00E9)  ->  e + ◌́   (U+0065 U+0301)
ñ  (U+00F1)  ->  n + ◌̃   (U+006E U+0303)

Combining marks are then placed in canonical order so that equivalent sequences always decompose to the same result. Because one character expands into several, the code point count usually grows. The conversion uses the engine’s native String.prototype.normalize("NFD").

Notes and example

A common follow-up is accent stripping: after NFD, remove every character in the combining diacritical marks block (U+0300 to U+036F) and café becomes cafe. NFD is also the canonical decomposition that NFC composes back from, so the two tools are exact inverses for canonical sequences. For compatibility decomposition that also collapses ligatures and full-width forms, use the NFKD tool.