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Last updated: 11. May, 2008 - Sunday     topic : 5,050 view : 457,051


iPhone lacking Unicode support for Arabic, Hebrew


2007-07-19 12:04:00    view : 2773

 

Here's an oddity: Arabic and Hebrew characters don't render in the iPhone's web browser. BBC News, for example, offers news in a variety of different languages, including Arabic. However, when you try to view those pages on the iPhone, the Arabic text renders as gibberish. A quick test of other sites in both Arabic and Hebrew showed that the iPhone's version of Safari doesn't render either language correctly. Safari on OS X (and, presumably, on Windows) handles Arabic and Hebrew just fine, and in fact languages with other alphabets do seem to display correctly on the iPhone's version of Safari: Chinese and Russian, for example. The problem likely lies in the character encodings supported by the iPhone's browser: indeed, visiting one site which tests Unicode support for browsers showed that Safari on the iPhone does not recognize any characters from Hebrew or Arabic, though it does recognize most characters from other encodings such as Cyrillic and Japanese. I presume support for other alphabets will materialize in a future software update, and I'd imagine it'd be necessary before the iPhone can be offered for sale in the Middle East, anyway.

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