The question is quiet simple: I've got an arabic text with an US formated Date in it. What is the correct display order of this date? Is it(for instance) 01/10/2009 or 2009/10/1?
The bidi algorithm recognizes the numbers an slashes as neutral and orders them in the same direction like the surrounding text. So the date should be backwards but that's not what any browser does. On the other hand, i can't find any rule in the unicode bidi algorithm which excludes date patterns. So, what is correct here and (especially) why?
without going deep in the technical details
I can tell that 01/10/2009 is the correct one and some times it's 10/01/2009
but it's never 2009/10/1
Related
I think answer to this question might not be difficult but tricky obviously . I do not know why I cannot show the Nepali numbers in my application form. Though alphabetical Nepalese characters (क, ख, ग, etc) are displayed correctly, whenever I type or copy numbers typed in Nepalese unicode fonts it automatically gets converted to English.
For eg. १२३४५६७८९० are Nepalese unicode characters representing 1234567890. Could you please help what is being missed. For your reference I have pasted the link here.
I am converting this from English Numbers to Nepali numbers using the following one-liner code. The output is in Nepali numbers. Other characters will not be affected.
If you use the "onkeyup" event for the field you could do the translation automatically.
const toNe = n => n.replace(/\d/g, d => "०१२३४५६७८९"[d])
// Tests
console.log(toNe("The value is 12000"));
console.log(toNe("0123456789"));
console.log(toNe("यो संख्या 25000 हो"));
console.log(toNe("जन्म मिति 25 अक्टोबर 2010 हो"));
In Qt5, the MMM format, which displays the month name in a short format (e.g., "Dec" instead of "12" or "December"), when using it for the Spanish locale, shows the abbreviated month name with a dot at the end, for example, for, "25th December 2016", in MMM/dd/yyyy format, shows "Dic./25/2016".
The problem is when editing. For displaying a date, it's ok, since it's what the Spanish rules say, but it isn't suitable for editing. I'm forced to position the cursor just after the point, at the end of the month part, to delete the point, and then, the rest of the month name. If I try to put the cursor just before the point, to edit just the month name part, the field is in "read-only" mode. I can't not remove anything, unless I remove everything from the very right of the line and back, character to character (or just selecting the whole month part and remove everything).
Besides, the point is not autocompleted. So, if the user writes the new month forgetting the dot, the edition is rejected and fall backs to the original value.
Taking all of it into account, editing a QDateEdit is a bit cumbersome (in Spanish).
I don't know if it is the built-in QDateEdit behaviour, or internally it is using a QRegExpValidator, but in that case, I don't know what it's the regexp expression, to personalize it from it.
In short, how can I "solved" it? (the cumbersome edition; it's ok for me both, removing the dot, or changing the validation).
The Qt 5 behavior is correct and there's nothing Qt can do (or should do). The only correct and acceptable short name of December in a es_ES locale is "dic.", trailing dot included. That's what CLDR says:
http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/30/summary/es.html#1636
http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/30/verify/dates/es.html
Is there an unicode symbol for "n/a"? There are some fractions like ½, but a n/a symbol seems to be missing.
If there is none, what would be the most appropriate unicode symbol to use for n/a in a website (which should be contained in common fonts, to avoid needing a webfont)?
Looking at the Unicode code charts, I do not see a single N/A symbol. I do, however, see ⁿ (U+207F) and ₐ (U+2090), which you could separate with / (U+002F) eg: ⁿ/ₐ, or ̷ (U+0337), eg: ⁿ̷ₐ, or ̸ (U+0338), eg: ⁿ̸ₐ. Probably not what you are hoping for, though. And I don't know if "common" fonts implement them, either.
For future reference, the fastest way I know to answer questions like the OP's when I have them myself is to go to unicodelookup.com, because of the way it works: there's a search bar at the top, and you just type a string and it will return any and all unicode characters containing that string (this is also a great way to discover new and useful symbols). So in the OP's case, he could proceed like this:
first try entering "not" (without the quotes) in the search field
visually scan through the results... doing so would not reveal a "not
applicable" character in this case
try again but this time entering "applic" in the search field
again, doing so would not turn up anything along the lines of what he's
looking for
At that point he would be reasonably confident the current Unicode standard does not have a "n/a" symbol.
If you use Firefox you can define a keyword like "uni" to search that site from the URL bar, meaning any time the browser is open and regardless of what page or site is currently showing, you could do this:
hit [F6]... this moves the cursor to the URL bar at the top
type something like "uni applic" and hit [Enter]... this brings up the
unicodelookup.com website with the search results for "applic" already
showing
For the above to work you would need to define your keyword ("uni" or wtv you prefer) to point to location http://unicodelookup.com/#%s.
There's a Negative Acknowlege icon...
␕ symbol for negative acknowledge 022025 9237 0x2415 ␕
Found by searching negative on the Unicode Lookup site.
I'm not a fan, and for my purposes have just gone with __N/A__ (Markdown..)
I see lots of answers going head-on at the "Not Applicable" abbreviation, without exploring what a symbol is. A quick search for the equivalent phrase "out of scope" brings up a couple of variations on the No symbol: ⃠ – this seems to fit the bill (and since I was looking for a way to represent inapplicability, I'll be using it in my technical document).
Per the Wikipedia article, the Unicode codepoint U+20E0 is a combining character, so it is superimposed on the preceding character; e.g. ! ⃠ overlays an exclamation point. To get it to appear isolated, use a non-breaking space
If you don't want to bother with the combining symbol, the article mentions there's also an emoji U+1F6AB 🚫 but it's typically going to be colored red, or won't render!
There's actually a single character that could be repurposed for this: the "Square Na" character ㎁ (U+3381), which is used to represent the nanoampere in fullwidth (CJK) scripts.
What about the "SYMBOL FOR NULL" ␀ (U+2400)?
I'm trying to implement a word count function for my app that uses UITextView.
There's a space between two words in English, so it's really easy to count the number of words in an English sentence.
The problem occurs with Chinese and Japanese word counting because usually, there's no any space in the entire sentence.
I checked with three different text editors in iPad that have a word count feature and compare them with MS Words.
For example, here's a series of Japanese characters meaning the world's idea: 世界(the world)の('s)アイデア(idea)
世界のアイデア
1) Pages for iPad and MS Words count each character as one word, so it contains 7 words.
2) iPad text editor P*** counts the entire as one word --> They just used space to separate words.
3) iPad text editor i*** counts them as three words --> I believe they used CFStringTokenizer with kCFStringTokenizerUnitWord because I could get the same result)
I've researched on the Internet, and Pages and MS Words' word counting seems to be correct because each Chinese character has a meaning.
I couldn't find any class that counts the words like Pages or MS Words, and it would be very hard to implement it from scratch because besides Japanese and Chinese, iPad supports a lot of different foreign languages.
I think CFStringTokenizer with kCFStringTokenizerUnitWord is the best option though.
Is there a way to count words in NSString like Pages and MSWords?
Thank you
I recommend keep using CFStringTokenizer. Because it's platform feature, so will be upgraded by platform upgrade. And many people in Apple are working hardly to reflect real cultural difference. Which are hard to know for regular developers.
This is hard because this is not a programming problem essentially. This is a human cultural linguistic problem. You need a human language specialist for each culture. For Japanese, you need Japanese culture specialist. However, I don't think Japanese people needs word count feature seriously, because as I heard, the concept of word itself is not so important in the Japanese culture. You should define concept of word first.
And I can't understand why you want to force concept of word count into the character count. The Kanji word that you instanced. This is equal with counting universe as 2 words by splitting into uni + verse by meaning. Not even a logic. Splitting word by it's meaning is sometimes completely wrong and useless by the definition of word. Because definition of word itself are different by the cultures. In my language Korean, word is just a formal unit, not a meaning unit. The idea that each word is matching to each meaning is right only in roman character cultures.
Just give another feature like character counting for the users in east-asia if you think need it. And counting character in unicode string is so easy with -[NSString length] method.
I'm a Korean speaker, (so maybe out of your case :) and in many cases we count characters instead of words. In fact, I never saw people counting words in my whole life. I laughed at word counting feature on MS word because I guessed nobody would use it. (However now I know it's important in roman character cultures.) I have used word counting feature only once to know it works really :) I believe this is similar in Chinese or Japanese. Maybe Japanese users use the word counting because their basic alphabet is similar with roman characters which have no concept of composition. However they're using Kanji heavily which are completely compositing, character-centric system.
If you make word counting feature works greatly on those languages (which are using by people even does not feel any needs to split sentences into smaller formal units!), it's hard to imagine someone who using it. And without linguistic specialist, the feature should not correct.
This is a really hard problem if your string doesn't contain tokens identifying word breaks (like spaces). One way I know derived from attempting to solve anagrams is this:
At the start of the string you start with one character. Is it a word? It could be a word like "A" but it could also be a part of a word like "AN" or "ANALOG". So the decision about what is a word has to be made considering all of the string. You would consider the next characters to see if you can make another word starting with the first character following the first word you think you might have found. If you decide the word is "A" and you are left with "NALOG" then you will soon find that there are no more words to be found. When you start finding words in the dictionary (see below) then you know you are making the right choices about where to break the words. When you stop finding words you know you have made a wrong choice and you need to backtrack.
A big part of this is having dictionaries sufficient to contain any word you might encounter. The English resource would be TWL06 or SOWPODS or other scrabble dictionaries, containing many obscure words. You need a lot of memory to do this because if you check the words against a simple array containing all of the possible words your program will run incredibly slow. If you parse your dictionary, persist it as a plist and recreate the dictionary your checking will be quick enough but it will require a lot more space on disk and more space in memory. One of these big scrabble dictionaries can expand to about 10MB with the actual words as keys and a simple NSNumber as a placeholder for value - you don't care what the value is, just that the key exists in the dictionary, which tells you that the word is recognised as valid.
If you maintain an array as you count you get to do [array count] in a triumphal manner as you add the last word containing the last characters to it, but you also have an easy way of backtracking. If at some point you stop finding valid words you can pop the lastObject off the array and replace it at the start of the string, then start looking for alternative words. If that fails to get you back on the right track pop another word.
I would proceed by experimentation, looking for a potential three words ahead as you parse the string - when you have identified three potential words, take the first away, store it in the array and look for another word. If you find it is too slow to do it this way and you are getting OK results considering only two words ahead, drop it to two. If you find you are running up too many dead ends with your word division strategy then increase the number of words ahead you consider.
Another way would be to employ natural language rules - for example "A" and "NALOG" might look OK because a consonant follows "A", but "A" and "ARDVARK" would be ruled out because it would be correct for a word beginning in a vowel to follow "AN", not "A". This can get as complicated as you like to make it - I don't know if this gets simpler in Japanese or not but there are certainly common verb endings like "ma su".
(edit: started a bounty, I'd like to know the very best way to do this if my way isn't it.)
If you are using iOS 4, you can do something like
__block int count = 0;
[string enumerateSubstringsInRange:range
options:NSStringEnumerationByWords
usingBlock:^(NSString *word,
NSRange wordRange,
NSRange enclosingRange,
BOOL *stop)
{
count++;
}
];
More information in the NSString class reference.
There is also WWDC 2010 session, number 110, about advanced text handling, that explains this, around minute 10 or so.
I think CFStringTokenizer with kCFStringTokenizerUnitWord is the best option though.
That's right, you have to iterate through text and simply count number of word tokens encontered on the way.
Not a native chinese/japanese speaker, but here's my 2cents.
Each chinese character does have a meaning, but concept of a word is combination of letters/characters to represent an idea, isn't it?
In that sense, there's probably 3 words in "sekai no aidia" (or 2 if you don't count particles like NO/GA/DE/WA, etc). Same as english - "world's idea" is two words, while "idea of world" is 3, and let's forget about the required 'the' hehe.
That given, counting word is not as useful in non-roman language in my opinion, similar to what Eonil mentioned. It's probably better to count number of characters for those languages.. Check around with Chinese/Japanese native speakers and see what they think.
If I were to do it, I would tokenize the string with spaces and particles (at least for japanese, korean) and count tokens. Not sure about chinese..
With Japanese you can create a grammar parser and I think it is the same with Chinese. However, that is easier said than done because natural language tends to have many exceptions, but it is not impossible.
Please note it won't really be efficient since you have to parse each sentence before being able to count the words.
I would recommend the use of a parser compiler rather than building one yourself as well to start at least you can concentrate on doing the grammar than creating the parser yourself. It's not efficient, but it should get the job done.
Also have a fallback algorithm in case your grammar didn't parse the input correctly (perhaps the input really didn't make sense to begin with) you can use the length of the string to make it easier on you.
If you build it, there could be a market opportunity for you to use it as a natural language Domain Specific Language for Japanese/Chinese business rules as well.
Just use the length method:
[#"世界のアイデア" length]; // is 7
That being said, as a Japanese speaker, I think 3 is the right answer.
I'm trying to find a workaround to display old and rare characters in unicode using character combining. Currently I'm converting some dictionaries from EPWING into text and there are 36 different characters which cannot be reproduced using normal UTF-8. Below is the problem section of the epwing gaiji to unicode mappings for one of the dictionaries that I am converting, in some areas it has an interesting syntax that is clearly being used to combine characters in different ways. I was hoping if someone could identify what this syntax is, and where I might find documentation or a tutorial on how to use it.
s/<?w=b02a>/𡓦/g
s/<?w=b04b>/者/g
s/<?w=b064>/<⾱ 𤰇>/g
s/<?w=b077>/<彳<匕\/匕>>/g
s/<?w=b07c>/<山\/⺀>/g
s/<?w=b12e>/𥝝/g
s/<?w=b155>/<／>/g
s/<?w=b156>/<\/>/g
s/<?w=b157>/<\/\/>/g
s/<?w=b158>/<こ[1]/と|ヿ>/g
s/<?w=b16f>/<㗢>/g
s/<?w=b170>/<㗥>/g
s/<?w=b171>/ଏ/g
s/<?w=b175>/lb/g
s/<?w=b22a>//g
s/<?w=b234>/ff/g
s/<?w=b25e>/㯌/g
s/<?w=b271>/<扌 晉>/g
s/<?w=b36b>/𣴴/g
s/<?w=b373>/𥝱/g
s/<?w=b42c>/𦼠/g
s/<?w=b434>/<已\/大>/g
s/<?w=b438>/𩸽/g
s/<?w=b43a>/𩺊/g
s/<?w=b43f>/<㇀/丶>/g
s/<?w=b440>/𠂆/g
s/<?w=b45a>/<？>/g
s/<?w=b45b>/<｜>/g
s/<?w=b53d>/<?>/g
s/<?w=b53e>/<?>/g
s/<?w=b540>/<o>/g
s/<?w=b537>/<ト モ>/g
s/<?w=b541>/<一/𠔀>/g
s/<?w=b544>/<?>/g
s/<?w=b546>/<[r45]卐>/g
s/<?w=b55f>/*/g
I know that this line is supposed to represent 彳as a left vertical radical with one 匕 stacked on top of another 匕 as the right vertical portion of the character:
s/<?w=b077>/<彳<匕\/匕>>/g
This one is also pretty obvious, it's a 卐 rotated 45 degrees:
s/<?w=b546>/<[r45]卐>/g
Note: the four character hexadecimal codes that come after the ?w= is an identifier for the epwing gaiji that the unicode is supposed to correspond to.
Thank you for your time.
Please see The Unicode Standard section 12.2, Ideographic Description Characters. It discusses your precise situation.
Unfortunately, you may found that software support for what you are trying to do is practically non-existent.