How to Join Arabic letters to form words

Question

I have to read arabic letters from xml file and display them as a word

input :س ع ا د ة output :سعادة look like that ..

I dont know how do that in any language , what algorithm to read, I need some start point to acomplish this task

I am also not sure if i have added the right tags, please free to make changes.

I thought pretty much every system will do that automatically. Perhaps if you gave a bit more details (what system you use, how you display the words etc). — JJJ, Sep 11 '11 at 08:57

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 13 '11 at 23:39

Unless you've been tasked with writing a system GUI level rendering/layout engine, eSniff's answer is almost certainly not what you want to do. This combining of Arabic letters will be done for you by the windowing system, as explained briefly on the Wikipedia page. In almost all circumstances, you should avoid the legacy Arabic presentation forms character code points. Just have a String of the basic Unicode Arabic codepoints and send them to a text field in your UI, and they will be rendered correctly....

X11 doesn't do it for you. There are libraries for X11 that do it for you, and the modern — Ken Bloom, Sep 13 '11 at 23:43

eSniff · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-12T22:22:07.823

For ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_characters_in_Unicode

Firstly, I don't know much about Arabic word forms and I just read the Wikipedia doc on it (linked above). Thanks for giving me a reason to read up on it but forgive me if I totally mess this up :-)...

The problem seems to be mapping the char to it's correct "case" based on it's position in the word, right? I'm basing this on the changes you showed in your examples. Anyway, in English this would be like upper-casing the the first letter. In Arabic it appears there are 4 char cases( Beginning, Middle, End and Isolated ). If this is correct here is an example in C# which does this mapping:

class ArabicMapper
{ 
    enum CaseMap{End=0, Middle=1, Beginning=2, Isolated=3};
    Dictionary<char, char[]> charMap; // This maps base letters to one of their four cases.
    public ArabicMapper()
    {
        //Create the char map for each letter in the alphabet. {BaseLetter, {End, Middle, Beginning, Isolated}}
        charMap = new Dictionary<char, char[]>();
        charMap.Add(0627, new char[] { FE8D, 0627, 0627, FE8E }); // ʾalif : Not sure of the rules for middle/beginning, so just using the isolated...
        charMap.Add(0628, new char[] { FE90, FE92, FE91, FE8F }); // bāʾ :
        //... and so on for each char ...

    }
    public string charsToWord(char[] word)
    {

        if (word.Length >= 2)
        {
            StringBuilder finalWord = new StringBuilder();

            for(int i=0; i<word.Length; i++)
            {
                if (i == 0)
                    finalWord.Append((charMap[word[i]])[CaseMap.Beginning]);
                else if(i == word.Length-1)
                    finalWord.Append((charMap[word[i]])[CaseMap.End]);
                else
                    finalWord.Append((charMap[word[i]])[CaseMap.Middle]);
            }
            return finalWord.ToString();
        }
        else
        {
            (charMap[word[0]])[CaseMap.Isolated].ToString();
        }
    }
}

P.S. I didn't test this code so it may not work. Treat it as pseudocode, please.

Given that this question was tagged a algorithm, my assumption was you wanted a sample Algorithm. Which I tried to put together, though given my lack of knowledge of Arabic I'm sure it's not correct. But if your looking for a general engineering solution (i.e. you have no business requirements to write your own) you should use system provided libraries as the other posters suggested. — eSniff, Sep 14 '11 at 16:23

How to Join Arabic letters to form words

2 Answers2