Arabic Presentation Forms-B
| Arabic Presentation Forms-B | |
|---|---|
| Range | U+FE70..U+FEFF (144 code points) |
| Plane | BMP |
| Scripts | Arabic (140 char.) Common (1 char.) |
| Symbol sets | contextual and isolate forms of Arabic letters and points |
| Assigned | 141 code points |
| Unused | 3 reserved code points |
| Unicode version history | |
| 1.0.0 (1991) | 140 (+140) |
| 3.2 (2002) | 141 (+1) |
| Unicode documentation | |
| Code chart ∣ Web page | |
| Note: The characters in this block were re-ordered in Unicode 1.0.1, in the process of merging with ISO/IEC 10646. | |
Arabic Presentation Forms-B is a Unicode block encoding spacing forms of Arabic diacritics, and contextual letter forms. The special codepoint ZWNBSP (zero width no-break space) is also here, which is only meant for a byte order mark (that may precede text, Arabic or not, or be absent) The byte-order mark is very useful in detecting endianness in UTF-16, because when it is at the start of UTF-16 data and the interpreter reads the first character as the noncharacter U+FFFE, the file is clearly interpreted with the wrong endianness. The block name in Unicode 1.0 was Basic Glyphs for Arabic Language; its characters were re-ordered in the process of merging with ISO 10646 in Unicode 1.0.1 and 1.1.
The presentation forms are present only for compatibility with older standards, and are not currently needed for coding text.