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Case Study – Multilingual URLs

This is about a website which helps ordinary users access hard-to-type orlocal-language Internet addresses (URLs) and doubles up as a quick URIencoder/decoder for programmers.

The Audience

Any computer user who communicates in any language whose written formutilises characters other than the plain 26 letters and 10 numerals in theLatin (English) alphabet.

The Problem

You need to send someone, say our Arnab in Finland, a Bengali (or anyother local language) URL. But you're not sure how it will show up (???)Usually anything in Bengali shows up as a series of the first consonant of theBengali language viz. “



” in Arnab’s Macintosh computer.

The Solution

Go tohttp://unescape.hereweb.com/ and click the "Clear All" button. Enter your Bengali (or other local language) URL in the white input box – plenty of Bengali ones are obtainable from http://bn.wikipedia.org/–and click the "Encode" button athttp://unescape.hereweb.com/.Now triple-click the text labelled "Result" to automatically select it fully including the invisible tail end.Copy the selected text and paste it in your email message or send ithowever you wish to send it to Arnab - even by SMS. Now Arnab will be ableto access that page with the Bengali (or other language) URL. Whether hecan read the text will depend on many other factors and if he can't he'll atleast be able to experience the multimedia including images and most of allhe'll be able to preserve the URL or forward it to someone or access it froma PC (as opposed to Mac) at some convenient time and place.

Example

Many social networking sites can’t handle local language text, right? Wellalmost! The following mixed-language URL won't make sense to yourbrowser because the way its Bengali portion has been represented:http://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/প্রিয়ঙ&#\2509;কা_বঢরা Now the "Encoded" (as discussed) version of the same URL pointing to thesame page is in the following line:http://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%BC%E0%A6%99%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%BE_%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%A2%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BE Yes the encoded URL is a bit longer, but it works! Try it. By the way thesame URL as above looks like this in unencoded form:http://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/

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For Programmers

You guys know this minisite is a very simple JavaScript application but it is veryhandy when you need the encoded or decoded form of something quickly as inthe middle of writing a program. In fact if your input begins with “http” then itwill be automatically handled with decodeURI or encodeURI; else withdecodeURIComponent or encodeURIComponent.

Forwarding This

This message was created with the objective that it should reach everycomputer user whose mother-tongue is not English. So a few words about how

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Share local language URLs

For all users, how to share local or mixed -language URL's on any computer with any operating system, notwithstanding unsupported fonts. For programmers an instant URI encoder/d... (More)

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Info and Rating

Category:	How-To Guides/Manuals
Rating:	(8 Ratings)
Upload Date:	06/01/2009
Copyright:	Public Domain
Tags:	arabic Wikipedia Chinese French Hebrew Spanish Espanol Greek bilingual Dutch (more tags) arabic Wikipedia Chinese French Hebrew Spanish Espanol Greek bilingual Dutch Japanese italian français Accent 日本語 romanian german italiano eesti russian (fewer)