Arabic and English text utilities: guides

108 guides in this section. Pick the question closest to yours, or browse by tool.

• How to convert Arabic numerals to English digitsConvert Arabic-Indic and Persian digits to Western digits, or the other way round, across a whole text, with links and emails protected.
• How to count words and characters in Arabic textHow to count words and characters in Arabic text accurately, why the character count differs from the byte count, and how diacritics affect it.
• How to compare two texts and find the differencesHow to compare two versions of a product description, contract or policy to see what was added, removed and changed, in Arabic and English, with a worked example.
• How to remove duplicate lines from a listHow to remove repeats from a long list while keeping the first occurrence of each line in place, and when “Coffee” and “coffee” count as the same line.
• How to remove extra spaces from textHow to clean text copied from Word, a PDF or a spreadsheet of repeated spaces, blank lines and hidden special spaces, with a preview before anything changes.
• How to sort a list alphabeticallyHow to sort a list of names or products alphabetically with ordering that understands Arabic, and why “item 10” comes before “item 2” unless you turn on numeric sorting.
• How to change English letters to upper or lower caseHow to change the English letters in your text to upper, lower or title case without touching Arabic words, and why Arabic has no capital letters at all.
• How to remove diacritics from Arabic textHow to remove harakat, tanwin, shadda and sukun from vocalized Arabic, choose exactly what goes, and why hamza letters and alef forms stay as they are.
• How to remove tatweel from Arabic textWhat the tatweel or kashida is, why it turns one word into two different words for a computer, and how to remove it without changing any other character.
• Product page URLs: Arabic or English?How to turn a product or article title into a clean URL slug, when to use an Arabic or an English one, and why an Arabic link gets longer when you copy it.
• Why does a website form cut my text off before the stated limit when it contains emojis?One emoji can count as two or more units to a system, and a family emoji as eight. How to tell which number a form really limits, and trim your text to fit.
• Do line breaks and hashtags count toward my Instagram caption length, and how do I check it before posting?In the word counter every line break is a character and every hashtag a word plus its letters. How to measure a multi-line caption before posting and compare it fairly.
• How do I check that my Arabic promotional SMS stays within the character count my SMS provider gave me?Compare characters and code points with the number your SMS provider gave you, and watch for diacritics that add code points without visible letters. A worked example.
• I'm a freelance translator who charges per word; how do I count the words in an Arabic file accurately before quoting?Count the source words accurately, and see why Arabic shows fewer words than its English translation: attached particles make «وبالعالم» a single word.
• How do I work out the reading time to show at the top of my blog post?Reading time is simple division: word count over a speed you choose. How to get it from the word counter, and why the default of 200 words per minute is an assumption.
• How many words should a 30-second Snapchat or TikTok ad script have?Use the word counter's reading-speed box as your own speaking pace, found with a timed read-aloud, then trim the script until the estimate matches the ad length.
• I pasted a product list with blank lines in it; how do I find out how many products it really has?Read 'Non-empty lines', not 'Lines': a blank line counts as a line, and a final line break never adds a phantom item. A worked example with four products.
• My description has five paragraphs but the counter says one; what is going wrong?In the word counter a paragraph is lines separated by a blank line, so five lines with single breaks make one paragraph. When to add blank lines, and when to read lines.
• Why does the counter find more sentences than my text has when I write an abbreviation like Dr. before a name?The sentence rule ends a sentence at a full stop followed by a new word and does not know abbreviations, so Dr. Smith adds one. Words and characters are unaffected.
• How do I check that my product title fits the character limit shown in my Noon or Amazon seller dashboard?Compare 'Characters (as read)' with the limit your seller dashboard shows for titles. Spaces, hyphens and digits all count, and doubled spaces steal characters unseen.
• Is it safe to paste a confidential contract or proposal into an online word counter?Counting runs in your browser, the text is not sent or stored, and the result file holds numbers only. Plus how to verify that yourself in a minute.
• A client asked for 500 characters of copy; do spaces count or not?Both conventions are common, so ask which one the client means. The word counter shows both side by side, and in a real product description spaces were about 15% of it.
• Do numbers and prices like 1,000.50 count as words in the counter?Yes, numbers are words, and a price with a thousands comma and decimal point is one word. A number split by a space or hyphen becomes two. Examples from price lists.
• I wrote a 1,000-word article for a client; why does the count go up when it has links, emails and hyphenated words?The counter follows Unicode rules, so an email address or full link splits into several words and well-known is two, while e.g. and don't stay one. Examples and fixes.