[Tutor] What kind of number is this

Sat Jul 25 11:33:13 CEST 2009

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>