Arabic ASCII?

[Jason Morningstar <mornj@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Friends,

I'm interested in comparing ASCII-transcibed VMS text to a language with
null characters, like arabic.  I've seen ISO 8859-6 and unicode alphabets,
but not ASCII.  I know physically representing arabic in a readable form
is impossible with ASCII, but I would think a transcription alphabet would
exist.  I'm really in the dark about language representation, and my goal
is a side-by-side comparison of text samples.   Can anyone give me any
pointers?  

Thanks,

Jason

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Jason Morningstar
School of Information and Library Science
UNC Chapel Hill