[Tutor] What kind of number is this

[Skipper Seabold]

2009/7/24 Emad Nawfal (عماد نوفل) <emadnawfal at gmail.com>:
> Hi Tutors,
> I have a bunch of text files that have many occurrences like the following
> which I believe, given the context,  are numbers:
>
> &#1633;&#1640;&#1639;&#1634;
>
> &#1637;&#1639;
>
>  &#1634;&#1632;&#1632;&#1640;
>
> etc.
>
> So, can somebody please explain what kind of numbers these are, and how I
> can get the original numbers back. The files are in Arabic and were
> downloaded from an Arabic website.
> I'm running python2.6 on Ubuntu 9.04
>
> --
> لا أعرف مظلوما تواطأ الناس علي هضمه ولا زهدوا في إنصافه كالحقيقة.....محمد
> الغزالي
> "No victim has ever been more repressed and alienated than the truth"
>
> Emad Soliman Nawfal
> Indiana University, Bloomington
> --------------------------------------------------------
>
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>

Googling the first number, they appear to be the HTML encoding of
(literally) Arabic numerals (?)

&#1633;

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%A1

-Skipper