National (non-Arabic) digits in Unicode?

Question

I know unicode contains all characters from most world aphabets..but what about digits? Are they part of unicode or not? I was not able to find straight answer. Thanks

Answer 1

As already stated, Indo-Arabic numerals (0,1,..,9) are included in Unicode, inherited from ASCII. If you're talking about representation of numbers in other languages, the answer is still yes, they are also part of Unicode.

//numbers (0-9) in Malayalam (language spoken in Kerala, India)
൦ ൧ ൨ ൩ ൪ ൫ ൬ ൭ ൮ ൯  
//numbers (0-9) in Hindi (India's national language)
० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९ 

You can use \p{N} or \p{Number} in a regular expression to match any kind of numeric character in any script.

This document (Page-3) describes the Unicode code points for Malayalam digits.

Answer 2

In short: yes, of course. There are three categories in UNICODE containing various representations of digits and numbers:

• Number, Decimal Digit (characters) – e.g. Arabic, Thai, Devanagari digits;
• Number, Letter (characters) – e.g. Roman numerals;
• Number, Other (characters) – e.g. fractions.