About Arabic sort order
Arabic sort order is described here by using the Arabic code page, not Unicode, because the former is more familiar to most users. The Arabic sort order table arranges the characters of the Arabic code page into a sort order. The sort order controls how data is sequentially ordered in Access databases that use the Arabic code page.
Note Access sorts right-to-left databases by using values from Unicode, not those from the right-to-left code page as in earlier versions. Opened or imported databases that use the Arabic code page and Arabic sort order will be converted to Unicode and General sort order.
The 256 characters of the Arabic code page can be organized into several categories that determine how characters are sorted.
- Kashida and bidirectional
control characters (hexadecimal code points 9D, 9E, DC, FD, and FE):
Sort ignores these characters.
- Arabic diacritics (hexadecimal code points F0 through F3, F5, F6, F8, and FA):
Sort ignores Arabic diacritics except when the strings being compared are otherwise identical. In this case, unmarked characters (without diacritics) sort ahead of marked characters (with diacritics); diacritics with lower code point values sort ahead of others.
- General control characters (hexadecimal code points 00 through 1F and 7F), reserved characters (hexadecimal code points 80, 81, 8D, 8E, 8F, and 90), and punctuation:
These three categories sort ahead of alphanumeric characters in category order (that is, General control characters first) and in ascending code point order within each category (for example, 00 sorts ahead of 01).
- Arabic and left-to-right alphanumeric characters (shown in the Arabic sort order table that follows):
Left-to-right text is always sorted ahead of Arabic text.
Left-to-right text sorting is not case sensitive. For example, although uppercase "A" is listed before lowercase "a" in the sort table, Access treats these characters equally and does not provide any sorting preference to either character.
Unmarked left-to-right text (without diacritics) is sorted before marked left-to-right text.
The following table lists the alphanumeric characters of the Arabic code page along with their respective hexadecimal code points. Characters (Char) are arranged in columns according to their sort order, starting in the upper-left corner.
