ISO88596

ISO/IEC 8859-6, commonly referred to as ISO-8859-6, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 family of single-byte character encodings. It is designed to encode the Arabic script for text interchange. The encoding uses 8 bits per character, with the lower half (0x00–0x7F) mirroring ASCII for compatibility, and the upper half assigned to Arabic letters, digits, punctuation, and a few other symbols. It does not provide any bidirectional algorithm or contextual shaping; those are handled by text rendering engines, so the same byte sequence may display differently depending on the surrounding text. This standard may be used in legacy systems and documents where a compact, single-byte representation was preferred.

This encoding was published in the 1980s as part of the ISO/IEC 8859 family to support major scripts without multibyte encodings. ISO-8859-6 was intended for Arabic-language environments, including software, email, and embedded devices. With the rise of Unicode and UTF-8, the use of ISO-8859-6 has declined, though older datasets and systems may still rely on it for compatibility.

See also: ISO/IEC 8859 family, Unicode, UTF-8, Windows-1256, Arabic script.