NFK

NFK is an acronym and a code used in multiple, unrelated contexts. The most clearly defined usage is in international standards, where NFK is the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code for Norfolk Island, a small external territory of Australia located in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. In that context, NFK appears in datasets, shipping, and other systems that rely on standardized country or territory identifiers.

In computing, NFK refers to a set of Unicode normalization forms known as the Normalization Form Compatibility. These forms address how characters are compared and stored when there are visually equivalent characters with different code points. The two commonly encountered variants are NFKC (Normalization Form Compatibility Composition) and NFKD (Normalization Form Compatibility Decomposition). NFK normalization applies compatibility mappings before decomposition or composition, which means characters that are considered compatible equivalents may be treated as identical for practical purposes such as searching, text comparison, and data processing. This can affect how strings with certain ligatures, punctuation, or formatting are matched or displayed.

Beyond these uses, NFK may appear as an acronym in other domains, depending on regional or organizational branding and naming. Because the same three letters can stand for different terms in different fields, the intended meaning of NFK typically depends on the surrounding context or accompanying qualifiers. In summary, NFK principally identifies Norfolk Island in geopolitical coding and serves as part of Unicode’s suite of normalization forms in text processing.