Unicode
As of Unicode 6.1, the following ranges encode Arabic characters:
- Arabic (0600-06FF)
- Arabic Supplement (0750-077F)
- Arabic Extended-A (08A0-08FF)
- Arabic Presentation Forms-A (FB50-FDFF)
- Arabic Presentation Forms-B (FE70-FEFF)
- Arabic Mathematical Alphabetic Symbols 1EE00-1EEFF)
The basic Arabic range encodes the standard letters and diacritics, but does not encode contextual forms (U+0621-U+0652 being directly based on ISO 8859-6); and also includes the most common diacritics and Arabic-Indic digits. U+06D6 to U+06ED encode Qur'anic annotation signs such as "end of ayah" ۖ and "start of rub el hizb" ۞. The Arabic Supplement range encodes letter variants mostly used for writing African (non-Arabic) languages. The Arabic Extended-A range encodes additional Qur'anic annotations and letter variants used for various non-Arabic languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-A range encodes contextual forms and ligatures of letter variants needed for Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Central Asian languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-B range encodes spacing forms of Arabic diacritics, and more contextual letter forms. The Arabic Mathematical Alphabetical Symbols block encodes characters used in Arabic mathematical expressions.
See also the notes of the section on modified letters.
Read more about this topic: Arabic Alphabet, Computers and The Arabic Alphabet