[Tutor] What kind of number is this

Sat Jul 25 14:14:38 CEST 2009

On 7/25/09, Dave Angel <davea at ieee.org> wrote:
> Emad Nawfal (9E'/ FHAD) wrote:
>> 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
>>
>>
> Those are standard html encodings for some Unicode characters. Skipper
> has identified one of them as the digit '1' written in Arabic.  I
> presume the others will also be recognizable to you, since you
> apparently know Arabic.  The following text should be copied to a flie
> with extension .html   Then you run that in a browser, to see the
> characters.
>
> DaveA
>
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//Dtd html 3.2//EN">
>
> <HTML>
> <HEAD>
> <TITLE>Test Arabic Characters</TITLE>
> </HEAD>
> <BODY>
>    <p>
> Table of characters <br>
> 1632 - &#1632;<br>
> 1633 - &#1633;<br>
> 1634 - &#1634;<br>
> 1635 - &#1635;<br>
> 1636 - &#1636;<br>
> 1637 - &#1637;<br>
> 1638 - &#1638;<br>
> 1639 - &#1639;<br>
> 1640 - &#1640;<br>
> 1641 - &#1641;<br>
>    </p>
> </BODY>
> </HTML>
>
>

Thank you very much Skipper and Dave.  Your replies have been very useful.
-- 
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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