problem with 'la'?

[ahmed at piousity dot net]

salams all,
hope everyone is well.

i posted on my blog yesterday (http://piousity.net/blog/?p=88) about this
problem, but my last two posts haven't shown up on planet.arabeyes.org
(not sure why this is... any ideas why its not showing up?).

so anyhow, the issue i am having is that “ﻻ” (which you get by
pressing b on the keyboard in arabic mode) in the beginning of strings
(lets say in a form for example) -- if you try to get the value of the
first character of the string, you get 0.  at the same time, if i do this
for any other arabic letter, i get back a number as normal...  is there
any reason why this is or is this a special case or is there something
that i am missing?

wsalams,
-ahmed