print arabic characters

[Martin v. Loewis]

Ahmad wrote:

>    I am a python newbie, I want to print on the console UTF-8 arabic
> characters. They print OK with
> print text.encode("UTF-8")

Are you talking about console mode (i.e. the cmd.exe window)? Or are
you perhaps talking about IDLE?

In Python 2.3, they should also print ok when you print a Unicode object
proper; sys.stdout.encoding should indicate what encoding the terminal
uses.

> BUT, the characters are printed LTR, not RTL (right to left). How can
> I change the printing direction??

Assuming it is IDLE: This is a bug in Tk, then - I don't know whether
Tk supports RTL.

Assuming it is the terminal: Does the terminal support RTL in the first
place? Python does nothing else but write the characters in logical
order to the terminal stream; it would be the terminal's job to put
them in the right display order. Perhaps printing RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK
(U+U200F) helps?

Regards,
Martin