Treat unicode character plus diacritic as a single character?

Question

In my VB.NET application I compare words that are recorded using IPA, many of which have many diacritic marks. In one of the comparisons, I compare the words character by character. But when I iterate over the characters, the diacritic marks come out as separate characters (as I would expect since this is unicode):

o`ku`ku`

However, a u character is different than a u plus an accent for the purposes of this program and needs to be distinguished.

Is there a good way to iterate over unicode strings in such a way that characters and their accents are considered one character? I'm trying to avoid having to hardcode all the combinations that combine to be considered a single character.

Edit:

The Normalize() method does work for characters with simple diacritic marks that have a single-character unicode representation, such as most accented vowels. However, this does not work for more obscure symbols, like uˤ and uˠ.

Answer 1

That's what string.Normalize() takes care of. You can use the Normalize(NormalizationForm) override to control this explicitly.