Arabic Tashkeel: Diacritics and Removal Regex

Common marks and combining signs

The dotted circle is a display aid, not part of the mark. Arabic labels are descriptive labels; the English column follows Unicode character names. Madda and combining hamza are included for identification, but the conservative removal example below does not remove them.

Additional Arabic-block signs

Together with the common-mark table, this table covers every nonspacing mark (Unicode general category Mn) in the Arabic block U+0600–U+06FF in the Unicode 17 character database. Arabic labels are descriptive translations, not standardized Arabic character names; the English names identify the characters precisely.

The additional signs include honorific marks, smaller vowel marks, extended-language vowel signs and Quranic annotations. This inventory does not include all combining marks in Arabic extension blocks. Do not remove this entire table as a default normalization policy.

Remove common vocalization only

For a search key, this expression removes U+064B–U+0652 and U+0670. It preserves madda, hamza and the supplementary signs above. The function is intentionally named for its scope: do not label it “remove all Arabic marks.”

function removeCommonTashkeel(text) {
  return text.replace(/[\u064B-\u0652\u0670]/g, "");
}
const original = "\u0643\u064E\u062A\u064E\u0628\u064E";
const searchKey = removeCommonTashkeel(original);

Preserve evidence and pronunciation

Guidance: store the original alongside a derived search key. Removing marks can merge differently vocalized words and names. In Quranic text, preserve the supplied marks and annotation unless a qualified editorial policy defines a separate search representation.

Do not use /\p{M}/gu as a supposedly Arabic-only cleanup: it removes combining marks across scripts. Likewise, NFD followed by indiscriminate mark removal can affect hamza-bearing letters through decomposition. Normalization and vocalization removal are separate operations; test both against your actual corpus.