Windows-1256 to UTF-8 - Arabic Text Converter

Convert Windows-1256 encoded Arabic text to UTF-8. Handle legacy Middle East data, emails, and databases. Supports file upload and text paste.

Input (Windows-1256)

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Output (UTF-8)

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Frequently Asked Questions

Windows-1256 (also known as CP1256) is an 8-bit character encoding designed by Microsoft for Arabic script. It extends ASCII to include Arabic letters, Arabic-Indic digits, and special characters used in Arabic typography. Developed in the 1990s for Windows systems, it was the dominant encoding for Arabic content before UTF-8 became standard.

Windows-1256 became widespread because it was the default Arabic encoding in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Office products during the 1990s and early 2000s. Many legacy systems, databases, and email archives in Arabic-speaking countries still use this encoding. It includes all necessary Arabic characters while maintaining compatibility with ASCII for English text.

Both encodings support Arabic text, but Windows-1256 includes additional characters not found in ISO-8859-6, such as typographic punctuation (curly quotes, em-dash), the Euro sign, and some Persian/Urdu characters. Windows-1256 maps characters differently in the 0x80-0x9F range. Windows-1256 became more popular due to Microsoft's dominance, while ISO-8859-6 was the official standard.

UTF-8 is the universal standard for modern web applications, databases, and APIs. Converting to UTF-8 ensures compatibility across platforms, prevents mojibake (garbled text), enables multilingual support in the same document, and future-proofs your data. Most modern systems expect UTF-8, so keeping legacy Windows-1256 data can cause display issues and data corruption during transfers.

The conversion preserves the character data but doesn't modify text direction. Right-to-left rendering is handled by your browser or application using Unicode bidirectional algorithms. After conversion to UTF-8, proper RTL display requires correct HTML markup (dir='rtl' or CSS direction property) or appropriate application settings. The Unicode characters themselves contain directionality information.

Yes, you can upload text files encoded in Windows-1256, and this tool will convert them to UTF-8. The tool reads the raw bytes using Windows-1256 decoding and re-encodes them as UTF-8. This is useful for converting legacy database exports, email archives, configuration files, or old Arabic documents. The output maintains line breaks and formatting.

Look for specific indicators: if Arabic text appears as gibberish or wrong characters when opened as UTF-8, it's likely Windows-1256. Check file metadata or HTTP headers for 'charset=windows-1256' or 'charset=cp1256'. In hex view, Arabic letters appear in the 0xC0-0xFF range. If you see characters like 'Ã', '¢', or '©' where Arabic should be, your text is Windows-1256 being misread as Latin-1 or UTF-8.

Common issues include: mixed encodings in the same file (parts in Windows-1256, parts in UTF-8), which cause partial corruption; byte order marks (BOM) that may need removal; control characters in the 0x80-0x9F range that differ between encodings; and double-encoding where text was already converted but displayed incorrectly. Always verify the output displays correctly and keep backups of original files.

Legacy email systems and older web servers defaulted to Windows-1256 for Arabic content because it was the standard Windows encoding when these systems were built. Many email clients automatically detected Windows-1256 for Arabic messages. Older websites usedtags. Modern systems use UTF-8, but you'll still encounter Windows-1256 in archived emails, legacy CMS platforms, and systems maintained since the 2000s.

This tool processes one file or text block at a time for accuracy and validation. For batch conversion of multiple files, you can use command-line tools like 'iconv' (iconv -f WINDOWS-1256 -t UTF-8) or write scripts using this tool's TextDecoder API approach. Browser-based batch processing would require uploading files sequentially or using a desktop application for automation.

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