Arabic text shows strange characters الÙباى انگليسى ØŒ - unicode

I have Arabic text (.sql pure text). When I view it in any document, it shows like this:
حر٠اول الÙباى انگليسى ØŒ حر٠اضاÙÙ‡ مثبت
But when I use an HTML document with <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>, it shows properly like this:
حرف اول الفباى انگليسى ، حرف اضافه مثبت
How can I convert it to readable text?

The Arabic text has been encoded to bytes using UTF-8.
You are explicitly telling the HTML document that the bytes are encoded in UTF-8, which is why any HTML viewer will be able to display the text correctly.
However, any other text viewer will not know the bytes are encoded in UTF-8, unless you put a UTF-8 BOM in front of the text, and the viewer supports BOMs. Otherwise, as you are seeing, a text viewer may instead interpret the bytes in Latin-1 or similar encoding instead. So, you would have to manually tell the text viewer to interpret the bytes as UTF-8 instead. But how you actually do that depends on the particular text viewer you are using. Not all viewers offer this option.

Related

.ENCODING international chars (hebrew,thai,russian,chinese,....)

international html files archived by wget
should contain chars like this
(example hebrew and thai:)
אב
הם
and ยคน
instead they are saved like this:
íäáåãéú and ÃÒ¡à§é
How to get the these displayed properly?
iconv filename.html
iconv: illegal input sequence at position 1254
SOLVED: There was nothing wrong.
Only i didnt notice the default php.ini did set the charset in the http header but
to use various charsets like this meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-874" you needed to set: default_charset = "empty";
....
The pages aren't "saved like this", whatever you're using to view the file is simply interpreting the encoding incorrectly. To know what encoding the file is in you should have paid attention to the HTTP Content-Type header during download; that's gone now.
Your only other chance is to parse the equivalent HTML meta tag in the <head>, if the document has one.
Otherwise, you can only guess the encoding of the document.
See What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text for more required background knowledge.

How to convert ANSI text to Unicode?

I would like to convert RTF text to Unicode. In the RTF font table one can find the name of the font or font-face (eg. Arial Cyr, Courier Greek) and the charset to use with it (0-255). So how to write a function that converts a character code (0-255) with these settings to Unicode?
As I see, the post-tags like Greek, Cyr, Tur etc. affect the glyph of the displayed characters and the charset affects it too. So the function could have these input parameters:
fontname postfix, font charset, character code
But what is next? Or am I on the wrong way?
RTF was invented long before Unicode. It most certainly isn't ANSI text, RTF only uses ASCII, it uses a rather unholy mix of character sets with non-ASCII characters encoded in hex with a reference to the character set. The mapping is also not perfect, many Unicode codepoints have no corresponding charset.
You'll spend a lifetime creating your own RTF to Unicode converter. Take advantage of an existing solution, most any platform has one. On Windows that would be the RichEdit control. If you use .NET then it is especially simple, use the RichTextBox class, assign its Rtf property and read back its Text property. Which is utf-16 encoded Unicode.

Difference between Unicode format?

I noticed something while uploading some unicode data to the database. When the content is uploaded throught textarea, is gets stored in क format, but when you personally type or paste the unicode and insert it hardcoded in php, then it would store in ठformat. But for both, the unicode character is same क.
Now please tell me the difference between the different formats of unicode characters. And how they affect the development. There has to be some limitations in those formats.
& #2325; is markup used in HTML to represent a Unicode character
If you hard code something in a php source file, Make sure you are opening it with editor that correctly displays text files with unicode characters in it.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html is good place to know the basics of unicode.
UTF-8 encoding of क has the byte sequence E0 A4
Now if somebody interprets this as 8 bit Latin encoding it will think it is two characters
you will see in the table in the above link E0 is à and A4 is ¤
When the content is uploaded throught textarea, is gets stored in क format,
Forms should not submit content in a character-reference (&#...;) format.
But in reality, they do in most current browsers... but only when they can't submit the character in question in any other way. In this case, you can't tell whether the user originally typed क or क, it is a lossy encoding.
To avoid this, make sure you are serving your page in a charset that supports all possible Unicode characters. In practical terms this means always use UTF-8, and serve your page with the Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8 header and/or the <meta http-equiv="Content=Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8"/> element in the header. You'll then get all characters in simple, uncorrupted UTF-8 format.

Should I use hex ascii accented character code in HTML or use the actual character?

I have several huge CSVs with lots of accented characters in html hex code: é for é and lots of others, even – for –, etc.
My site is a wiki for people to update listings. So when they are presented a textarea for update, the existing content is filled in, and obviously those hex codes will be shown.
Should I be bothered replacing those codes with actual accented characters, or just leave it as it is? I wrote a script to replace the characters, but somehow the output are weird characters. Probably the format saved in Ruby isn't in UTF-8 format.
By default my site is in UTF-8, and the accented characters are displayed properly with some html coding in the view.
Please advise. Thanks.
Could you clarify what the problem is?
If your data (CSV) is in UTF-8, and the default encoding of your site is UTF-8, then all you would need to do is make sure that when users are editing content, that content is properly treated as UTF-8.
You may not need to display the markup to the users. Perhaps you could leverage a WYSIWIG editor package like TinyMCE?

UTF8 charset, diacritical elements, conversion problems - and Zend Framework form escaping

I am writing a webapp in ZF and am having serious issues with UTF8. It's using multi lingual content through Zend Form and it seems that ZF heavily escapes all of these characters and basically just won't show a field if there's diacritical elements 'é' and if I use the HTML entity equivalent e.g. é it gets escaped so that the user will see 'é'.
Zend Form allows for having non escaped data, but trying to use this is confusing, and it seems it'd need to be used all over the place.
So, I have been told that if the page and the text is in UTF8, no conversion to htmlentities is required. Is this true?
And if the last question is true, then how do I convert the source text to UTF8? I am comfortable setting up apache so that it sends a default UTF8 charset heading, and also adding the charset meta tag to the html, but doing this I am still getting messed up encoding. I have also tried opening the translation csv file in TextWrangler on OSX as UTF8, but it has done nothing.
Thanks!
L
'é' and if I use the HTML entity equivalent e.g. é it gets escaped so that the user will see 'é'.
This I don't understand. Can you show an example of how it is displayed, as opposed to how it should be displayed?
So, I have been told that if the page and the text is in UTF8, no conversion to htmlentities is required. Is this true?
Yup. In more detail: If the data you're displaying and the encoding of the HTML page are both UTF-8, the multi-byte special characters will be displayed correctly.
And if the last question is true, then how do I convert the source text to UTF8?
Advanced editors and IDEs enable you to define what encoding the source file is saved in. You would need to open the file in its current encoding (with special characters being displayed correctly) and save it as UTF-8.
If the content is messed up when you have the right content-type header and/or meta tag specified, then the content is not UTF-8 yet. If you don't get it sorted, post an example of what it looks like here.