Arabic number problem in asp.net

Well, I did not check it up with concrete Arabic cultures because there are different kind of Arabic numerals. From elementary school children remember that our Western numerals we always used — 0123456789 — are called Arabic Numerals. (Is it a surprise for you? :-))

Is there something "more Arabic"? Of course, later on I came across the numerals:

٠ 	١ 	٢ 	٣ 	٤ 	٥ 	٦ 	٧ 	٨ 	٩
Decimal separator: '٫', thousand separator: '٬'.

(I had to enclose them in PRE block because it's pretty hard to edit a mix of left-to-right and right-to-left Unicode characters.)

There are different variants of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system.

First variant is called "Western Arabic", second one — "Eastern Arabic", according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphs_used_with_the_Hindu-Arabic_numeral_system[^]. About Eastern Arabic, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals[^].

So, do you need Eastern Arabic?

One could expect that right representation could be obtained using correct culture for string numeric format:

int myInteger = //
string cultireId = //?
string num = myInteger.ToString(new System.CultureInfo(cultureId));

//using a different constructor:
int cultireId = //?
CultureInfo culture = new CultureInfo(cultureId);
//...

But what culture should be used to obtain Eastern Arabic? I don't know; and I don't know if such support exist in .NET.

If not, this is easy to work around. These digits are represented by the Unicode code point range 0x0660 to 0x0669 (representing 0 to 9), followed by Arabic percent sign, decimal separator and thousand separator. So, a simple conversion could be used:

const UInt16 shift = 0x0660 - 0x0030;

//...

string EasternArabic(int value) {
    System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
    foreach(char input in neutral) {
        UInt16 codePoint = Convert.ToUInt16(input);
        codePoint += shift;
        sb.Append(Convert.ToChar(codePoint));
    }
    return sb.ToString();
}

See http://unicode.org/[^].

—SA