[PowerRename] Fix Unicode characters and non-breaking spaces not being correctly normalized before matching

[daverayment]

Summary of the Pull Request

Fixes PowerRename failing to normalise different Unicode forms before matching. This results in filenames containing visually identical characters to the search term from failing to match because their underlying binary representations differ.

This affects renaming files created on macOS which names files in NFD (decomposed form) rather than Windows' NFC (precomposed form).

Additionally, this fixes matching to filenames containing non-breaking space characters, which can be created by automated systems and web downloaders. Previously, the NBSP character would fail to match a normal space.

PR Checklist

• Closes: [PowerRename] Decomposed Unicode (NFD) and non-breaking spaces are not detected, resulting in mismatches #43971
• Closes: PowerRename: a part of PT that doesn't work at all and completely unintuitive #43815
• Communication: I've discussed this with core contributors already. If the work hasn't been agreed, this work might be rejected
• Tests: Added/updated and all pass
• Localization: All end-user-facing strings can be localized
• Dev docs: Added/updated
• New binaries: Added on the required places
  • JSON for signing for new binaries
  • WXS for installer for new binaries and localization folder
  • YML for CI pipeline for new test projects
  • YML for signed pipeline
• Documentation updated: If checked, please file a pull request on our docs repo and link it here: #xxx

Detailed Description of the Pull Request / Additional comments

The underlying issue is a binary mismatch between:

1. Precomposed characters (NFC) typed by Windows users, e.g. U+0439 - й.
2. Decomposed characters (NFD) found in filenames from other platforms (or copied from text), e.g. U+0438 U+0306 - и + ̆ .
3. Standard spaces (U+0020) versus non-breaking spaces (U+00A0).

Updates to PowerRenameRegex.cpp

I added a SanitizeAndNormalize function which replaces all non-breaking spaces with standard spaces and normalises the string to Normalization Form C using Win32's NormalizeString.

PutSearchTerm and PutReplaceTerm now normalise input immediately before performing any other processing.

Replace now normalises the source filename before processing.

I updated the RegEx path to ensure it runs against the normalised sourceToUse string instead of the raw source string; otherwise regex matches would fail.

Validation Steps Performed

Manually tested the use case detailed in #43971 with the following filenames:

• Testй NFC.txt
• Testй NFD.txt

Result:

There are two new unit tests which exercise both the non-breaking space and Unicode form normalisation issues. These run on both the Boost- and non-Boost test paths, adding four tests to the total. All new tests fail as expected on the prior code and all PowerRename tests pass successfully with the changes in this PR:

[github-actions]

@check-spelling-bot Report

🔴 Please review

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Unrecognized words (3)

icf
IRDP
precomposed

These words are not needed and should be removed

irdp

To accept these unrecognized words as correct and remove the previously acknowledged and now absent words, you could run the following commands

... in a clone of the [email protected]:daverayment/PowerToys.git repository
on the powerrename-normalizestrings branch (ℹ️ how do I use this?):

curl -s -S -L 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/check-spelling/check-spelling/c635c2f3f714eec2fcf27b643a1919b9a811ef2e/apply.pl' |
perl - 'https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/actions/runs/19788524302/attempts/1' &&
git commit -m 'Update check-spelling metadata'

Errors ❌ (1)

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❌ Errors	Count
❌ check-file-path	1

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