I can't speak as to whether the OP will encounter characters an in their decomposed forms or not, but about 40% of both Hiragana and Katakana have multi-code point decomposed forms. "ば" (U+3070, HIRAGANA LETTER BA) can be written as "は" (U+306F, HIRAGANA LETTER HA) plus combining "゛" (U+3099, COMBINING KATAKANA-HIRAGANA VOICED SOUND MARK).