Penetration Testing mailing list archives
RE: ASCII to Arabic character conversion
From: "jeremiah" <jeremiah () nur net>
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 10:41:32 -0800
These may be UNICODE, or they may be not. That is a big assumption. Arabic has at least two ASCII style encodings that I have heard of. There is ASMO, which works like ASCII, but encodes non-latin characters. There is another system similar to this, I cannot recall its name - and there are ASCII codepages for representing Arabic. The Persian alphabet - which supersets Arabic - has ISIRI 6219, another encoding that looks like ASCII - but maps Persian letters. All of these are 8-bit char encoding, not 16-bit UNICODE, and all are still in some currency - especially in terminal-based applications and OS shells. You will need some educated guess work, to begin decoding these chars. Automated translation just doesn't work in this space. I have seen nothing commercial. You have to read Arabic letters to get the meaning here, I'm afraid. Most translation systems are restricted to latin character sets. There are, of course, some fancy Japanese pocket translators that work in Romanji/Kanji - The closest I've seen is a pocket electronic Persian/English dictionary. That's a far cry from what's needed here! jc
-----Original Message----- From: Justin Ferguson [mailto:jnferguson () gmail com] Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2005 3:56 AM To: P. Entester Cc: pen-test () securityfocus com Subject: Re: ASCII to Arabic character conversion Peter, I wanted to add a couple things here. Firstly, its impossible to represent arabic in ASCII, each byte only has a max value of 255, and all of the possible values have been has already been assigned values. With that said you are most likely looking at something in unicode format. I realize its semantics, but its important as you try to convert it. With that said, are you wanting to translate it to english? I don't know of an automated tool that can do this other than perhaps babelfish or the likes. Additionally, I don't think its possible to convert it to ASCII, and even if it was I believe it would be useless gibberish. The best option most likely is then, from a programatic standpoint, is not to convert anything, but rather just handle each multibyte/widebyte character as a single character. If you are simply wanting to translate to english, then conversion of encodings is trivial/pointless. The final option, if you want to convert it to ASCII or similar is to transliterate each character and then convert them to ASCII as you go, I'm not sure how you would do this in a programmatic manner without an in-depth knowledge of the language. So in conclusion, you really need to be more specific about what you are trying to accomplish-- and chances are without translation to english or transliteration, you are SOL. If you want to give just straight encoding format conversions, you can try the iconv program, assuming you are on a posix compliant platform. Best Regards, Justin F. On 12/1/05, P. Entester <pentest__ () hotmail com> wrote:Hello again, In the same capture as my previous post, all the answers are in Arabic. So, i have ACSII representatation of Arabic characters, representingcelldata, that i need to translate. Is anyone here aware of a tool or a method to assist me in this? Thanks a lot, Peter Entester. _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------Audit your website security with Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner: Hackers are concentrating their efforts on attacking applications onyourwebsite. Up to 75% of cyber attacks are launched on shopping carts,forms,login pages, dynamic content etc. Firewalls, SSL and locked-down serversarefutile against web application hacking. Check your website forvulnerabilitiesto SQL injection, Cross site scripting and other web attacks beforehackers do!Download Trial at: http://www.securityfocus.com/sponsor/pen-test_050831 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Audit your website security with Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner: Hackers are concentrating their efforts on attacking applications on your website. Up to 75% of cyber attacks are launched on shopping carts, forms, login pages, dynamic content etc. Firewalls, SSL and locked-down servers are futile against web application hacking. Check your website for vulnerabilities to SQL injection, Cross site scripting and other web attacks before hackers do! Download Trial at: http://www.securityfocus.com/sponsor/pen-test_050831 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Audit your website security with Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner: Hackers are concentrating their efforts on attacking applications on your website. Up to 75% of cyber attacks are launched on shopping carts, forms, login pages, dynamic content etc. Firewalls, SSL and locked-down servers are futile against web application hacking. Check your website for vulnerabilities to SQL injection, Cross site scripting and other web attacks before hackers do! Download Trial at: http://www.securityfocus.com/sponsor/pen-test_050831 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current thread:
- ASCII to Arabic character conversion P. Entester (Dec 01)
- Re: ASCII to Arabic character conversion Justin Ferguson (Dec 01)
- RE: ASCII to Arabic character conversion jeremiah (Dec 01)
- Re: ASCII to Arabic character conversion Justin Ferguson (Dec 01)