You can normalize the unicode string in one of 2 ways: NFC or NFD:
iex(3)> :unicode.characters_to_nfc_list("\u00e9")
[233]
iex(4)> :unicode.characters_to_nfd_list("\u00e9")
[101, 769]
iex(5)> :unicode.characters_to_nfd_list("\xc3\xa9")
[101, 769]
iex(6)> :unicode.characters_to_nfc_list("\xc3\xa9")
[233]
