Whether those two strings are or are not equivalent depends on the context. If we're assuming (as the GP did) a very generic context where we simply want to sto

Whether those two strings are or are not equivalent depends on the context. If we're assuming (as the GP did) a very generic context where we simply want to store arbitrary strings in a sorted data structure, then there is no reason to assume they are supposed to be interpreted as Unicode. For a simple example, perhaps this is a list of strings that require Unicode normalization to be properly interpreted as human text that you are storing into a TreeMap for efficient retrieval. When you are adding "\u00f1" to the list, you wouldn't want the collection to say that it's already there because it already had "\u006e\u0303".