unicode direction control characters

[Robin Becker]

I'm seeing some strange characters in web responses eg

u'\u200e28\u200e/\u200e09\u200e/\u200e1962'

for a date of birth. The code \u200e is LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK according to 
unicodedata.name.  I tried unicodedata.normalize, but it leaves those characters 
there. Is there any standard way to deal with these?

I assume that some browser+settings combination is putting these in eg perhaps 
the language is normally right to left but numbers are not.
-- 
Robin Becker