ISO/IEC 8859-6

ISO-8859-6 (ASMO 708)
MIME / IANAISO-8859-6
Alias(es)iso-ir-127, ECMA-114, ASMO-708, arabic, csISOLatinArabic[1]
StandardASMO 708, ECMA-114, ISO/IEC 8859-6
Classificationextended ASCII, ISO 8859
ExtensionsOEM-708, Mac OS Arabic (almost)
Preceded byASMO 449
Succeeded byUnicode
Other related encoding(s)Windows-1256 (incompatible, moves several letters)

ISO/IEC 8859-6:1999, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 6: Latin/Arabic alphabet, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. It is informally referred to as Latin/Arabic. It was designed to cover Arabic. Only nominal letters are encoded, no preshaped forms of the letters, so shaping processing is required for display. It does not include the extra letters needed to write most Arabic-script languages other than Arabic itself (such as Persian, Urdu, etc.).

ISO-8859-6 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. The text is in logical order, so BiDi processing is required for display. Nominally ISO-8859-6 (code page 28596) is for "visual order", and ISO-8859-6-I (code page 38596) is for logical order. But in practice, and required for HTML and XML documents, ISO-8859-6 also stands for logical order text. There is also ISO-8859-6-E which supposedly requires directionality to be explicitly specified with special control characters; this latter variant is in practice unused. IBM has assigned code page/CCSID 1089 to ISO 8859-6.[2][3] It is an emulation for their AIX operating system.

ISO-8859-6 was used as the reference standard for encoding the Arabic script in Unicode[4] but is now technologically obsolete.[5] Unicode is preferred in modern applications, especially on the Internet; meaning the dominant UTF-8 encoding for web pages (see also Arabic script in Unicode, for complete coverage, unlike for e.g. ISO-8859-6 or Windows 1256 that do not cover extras). Less than 0.0002% of all web pages use ISO-8859-6,[6][7] and it is not even the third-most popular encoding option for Arabic on the web.

  1. ^ Character Sets, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), 2018-12-12
  2. ^ "Code page 1089 information document". Archived from the original on 2016-03-17.
  3. ^ "CCSID 1089 information document". Archived from the original on 2016-03-27.
  4. ^ "The Unicode Standard v15.0 Chapter 9" (PDF).
  5. ^ Computing and the Qurʾān - Some caveats, 2007, Thomas Milo
  6. ^ "Usage Statistics of ISO-8859-6 for Websites, October 2022". w3techs.com. Retrieved 2022-10-25.
  7. ^ "Frequently Asked Questions".