Niall Loughnane wrote:there are space characters 160 (non breaking space character) and 32 (space) - these represent a space characters but are distinct different individual characters,
That isn't correct. ASCII only defines characters in the range from 0 to 127. Now, Unicode does declare 160 as a non-breaking space character, but then it declares a whole lot of other characters as space characters as well.
Here is a document which lists twenty of them but there could be others. As far as I can see the Unicode normalization algorithms don't do anything with those various space characters -- and speaking of normalization, have you built that into your specialized string comparison?