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Sounds like a good idea ;) I'll let the Persian service know, as they might be very
interested in your news bot.
Currently the bot is only running on MSN, and although I managed
to get the right-to-left issue to work using the official MSN client (in my
case Windows Live Messenger beta), it seems that not all 3rd party clients
support the "X-MMS-IM-Format" field (where I set the R-to-L orientation), so
for example Trillian ignores it and displays the messages incorrectly L-to-R.
I haven't tried other clients yet.
----
Interesting issue, I'm trying it in Gaim which has great
Unicode and multiple language support. I don't
speak/read Farsi or Arabic, so can't really tell if the content is ok
(although I compared it visually to what's on the BBC website to get some
idea). I use the nearly-full-text feed at
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/persian/index.xml (I believe Ian set
that up?), and have noticed some strange HTML tags in the feeds, all of which
(rightly or wrongly) also make it into the bot messages.. in addition, the
menu-type texts are all in English for now, and should really be
translated.
----
Maybe if I speak to someone in the Persian service they might
be able to let you know if it looks and reads
correctly.
Can you let me
know what tags your getting as I might be outputting too
much. The bot is on MSN as "
[EMAIL PROTECTED]". Once you join, you'll get the 10
most recent news headlines from
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/persian/index.xml every hour, to
which you can respond with a number (1 to 10) to see more details for the news
headline you're interested in (I decided to change this from the way the
English news flashes work due to the feeds containing much more text, so it
wasn't practical to send all news details in one message).
---
Ok
I've tested your bot and it seems to work really well. It would be great
to get this on other networks. I think we may
have someone from Jabber who could help on this list.
In
Gaim the Persian text is correctly displayed right to left and English text is
left to right. It looks great!
