​Crash Course: Unicode & Strings for iOS Developers (Swift)

​A practical crush dive into how strings really work in Swift and Apple platforms.

​This course is designed for iOS developers who want to understand Unicode beyond surface-level APIs — and avoid subtle bugs in production apps.

​You will learn:

1. ​Unicode Fundamentals • The history of Unicode • Unicode vs. ASCII • Code points, scalar values, grapheme clusters

2. ​Swift String Architecture • String vs. NSString • Standard Library vs. Foundation behavior • Bridging mechanics and performance implications • UTF-8 vs. UTF-16 encodings

3. ​Equality, Hashing & Collections • How String equality works • Canonical equivalence in Swift • Impact on Dictionary and Set

4. ​Strings in Memory • Reading raw string memory in the debugger

5. ​String Normalization • Canonical vs. compatibility normalization • NFC, NFD, NFKC, NFKD

6. ​String Sorting & Locale • Unicode scalar ordering vs. localized comparison

7. ​String Searching

8. ​macOS Emoji & Symbols • Unicode input sources