## plotting arabic in R
## get unicode from pasted text or from here:
## http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/ArabicShaping.txt
## just replace the first 0 with u

x2 <- "\uFDF2"  ## the unicode for allah
x2
plot.new(); plot.window(0:1,0:1); text(0.5,0.5,x2,cex=12)

## This is great, but sometimes you don't want to enter
## the unicode as unicode.  Perhaps you have the unicode numbers
## and you want to turn it into unicode somehow.  Well, you can't 
## do it directly because you can't do

paste("\","u0631",sep="")

## and 

x <- paste("\\","u0631", sep="")
plot(0,0,type="n")
text(0,0,x)

## doesn't get you what you want

## Instead we use the Unicode package
library(Unicode)
x <- c("0x0631","0x0633","0x0648","0x0644")
plot(0,0,type="n")
x2 <- intToUtf8(x)
text(0,0,x2)

## With multiple words, you can't just feed it all through at once.  
## Instead, do this:

## This is just constructing some fake words
word1 <- c("0x0647", "0x0644")
word2 <- c("0x0646","0x0639")
word3 <- c("0x0631","0x0645","0x0639")
word4 <- c("0x062f","0x0645", "0x062d", "0x0627")
## This is what I do
## first, put it into a list
words <- list(word1,word2,word3,word4)
## then apply the unicode function to the list, unlist, and collapse
wordsToPlot <-paste(unlist(lapply(words,intToUtf8)),collapse=" ")
plot(0,0,type="n")
text(0,0,wordsToPlot)


## sometimes, arabic gets dumped into files and looks like this:
x <- "<U+0627><U+0644><U+0635><U+0641><U+062D><U+0629>"
x
## Not very useful...we'd like to convert x back to unicode
## http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17761858/converting-a-u-escaped-unicode-string-to-ascii
x1 <- paste(paste0("\\u",strsplit(gsub("<|>","",x), "U+",fixed=T)[[1]][-1]), collapse="")
x2 <- parse(text = paste0("'", x1, "'"))
x3 <- x2[[1]]
x3