Re: Arabization, techniques and problems

[Gregg Reynolds <gar at arabink dot com>]

maysara a wrote:
> Salam all,
>
> Im trying to initiate an open source community in my
> university, and i need to intriduce students to open
> source and to contribute to already existing software
> and documentations and other.

Here's another project you might find interesting.  Enhance regular 
expression syntax to support Arabic-specific search, and then implement 
your ideas in GNU "grep".

Here's a brief example of what I mean.  Standard regexes use the 
metacharacter "." to mean "match any single character".  So a search 
pattern like "k.b" will match ktb, krb, etc. but also kab, kub, 
k<sukuun>b, etc.

Which is fine; but in Arabic we may want to ignore "stackers" (fatha, 
shadda, etc.).  So we need another metacharacter that means "match any 
non-stacking character".  Suppose we use ":" with this meaning.  Then 
the search pattern "k:b" will match ktb, krb, etc., but *not* kab, kub, 
k<sukuun>b, etc.

If you start by asking "what kinds of searches might an Arabic speaker 
want to do" and then think about how regexes could make such searches 
natural and easy, you can come up with a lot of ideas.

-gregg