I have two columns in a database, let's call them STRING and NORMALIZED_STRING. The characters in STRING are processed by some to me unknown algorithm, to become the characters in the normalized form. 
A character can consist of one or more bytes.
A character can be changed in one of several ways:
   1. it can simply be deleted
   2. a multi byte character can be mapped to a single byte character
   3. a single byte character can be mapped to a multibyte character

an example.

STRING   NORMALIZED_STRING
------   -----------------
ABCÅD    ABCD
ABCÄD    ABCëëD
ABCááD   ABCèD

What I want to do is to be able to recreate the same kind of normalization myself. Now, of course I could go through the thousands of rows manually and try to find out how it works. But I am hoping it could be possible to let Perl do the analyzing and by comparing the strings come up with some mapping scheme: 

'Å'  => '',
'Ä'  => 'ëë',
'áá' => 'è'

I would be very happy if this was possible!
Thanks in advance for your insights,

/L

In reply to Characters in disguise by Anonymous Monk

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