How to show Persian numbers on ASP.NET MVC page?

Question

I'm building a site which needs to support both English and Persian language. The site is built with ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4 (C#). All my controllers inherit from a BaseController, which sets culture to "fa-IR" (during test):

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("fa-IR");
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo("fa-IR");

In my views, I'm using static helper classes to convert into right timezone and to format date. Like:

DateFormatter.ToLocalDateAndTime(model.CreatedOnUtc)

I'm doing the same for money with a MoneyFormatter. For money, the currency prints correctly in Persian (or, at least I think so as I don't know any Persian. It will be verified later on though by our translators). The same goes for dates, where the month is printed correctly. This is what it displays as currently:

For money:

قیمت: ريال 1,000 

For dates:

21:01 ديسمبر 3

In these examples, I want the numbers to also print in Persian. How do you accomplish that?

I have also tried adding:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1256" />

in the HEAD tag, as recommended on some forums. Does not change anything though (from what I can see). I have also added "fa-IR" as the first language in my browser languages (both IE and Firefox). Didn't help either.

Anyone got any ideas on how to solve this? I'd rather avoid creating translation tables between English numbers and Persian numbers, if possible.

Best regards,
Eric

Answer 1

firs of all you should use a font-face that supports Persian number. I use this technique and I can show Persian number on my web site. fonts like:BNazanin.

Answer 2

Maybe you have to change the font. If you know your client supports a particular font, say Badr or Nazanin, then you can change the font-family for those numbers, and I think that will work for you.

You can supply for the font for your page, but I think this only works in modern browsers and fails in the old ones. You can check this.
Hope that helps.

Answer 3

How are you printing the numbers to the output? I don't have much experience with localization but you might have to use the appropriate NumberFormatInfo or something similar to format the number.

Also for greatest portability you should probably be using UTF8 as the encoding.

Answer 4

After some further research I found an answer from a Microsoft employee stating that they don't translate numbers, though it's fully possible to do it yourself using the array of digits for a specific culture, that is provided by the NativeDigits property (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.numberformatinfo.nativedigits.aspx).

To find out if text that is submitted in a form is Arabic or Latin I'm now doing:

public bool IsContentArabic(string content)
{
    string pattern = @"\p{IsArabic}";
    return Regex.IsMatch(
        content, 
        pattern, 
        RegexOptions.RightToLeft | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Multiline);
}

public bool IsContentLatin1(string content)
{
    string pattern = @"\p{IsBasicLatin}";
    return Regex.IsMatch(
        content, 
        pattern, 
        RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Multiline);
 }

And to convert Persian digits into their "Latin" equivalents, I wrote this helper:

public static class NumberHelper
{
    private static readonly CultureInfo arabic = new CultureInfo("fa-IR");
    private static readonly CultureInfo latin = new CultureInfo("en-US");

    public static string ToArabic(string input)
    {
        var arabicDigits = arabic.NumberFormat.NativeDigits;
        for (int i = 0; i < arabicDigits.Length; i++)
        {
           input = input.Replace(i.ToString(), arabicDigits[i]);
        }
        return input;
    }

    public static string ToLatin(string input)
    {
        var latinDigits = latin.NumberFormat.NativeDigits;
        var arabicDigits = arabic.NumberFormat.NativeDigits;
        for (int i = 0; i < latinDigits.Length; i++)
        {
            input = input.Replace(arabicDigits[i], latinDigits[i]);
        }
        return input;
    }
}

I've also hooked in before model binding takes place and there I convert digit-only input from forms into Latin digits, if applicable.

Ako, for what direction goes we managed to solve quite a bit of issues using the 'dir' attribute (dir => direction) on the html tag for our Web page. Like this:

<html dir="rtl">

The 'dir' attribute takes either "rtl" (right-to-left) or "ltr" (left-to-right).

Hope this helps someone!