ArabicKit

Production-ready Kotlin utilities for Arabic text normalization, search, range mapping, highlighting, and numeral conversion on Android.

ArabicKit 0.2.0 adds original-text search ranges, multiple-match support, and Android highlighting. The API is tested, but 0.x releases may still evolve before the first stable release.

Current capabilities

• Remove Arabic diacritics and Quranic annotation marks.
• Remove tatweel.
• Normalize alef variants and alef maksura.
• Normalize whitespace and Latin casing.
• Search through normalized Arabic text.
• Return match ranges in the original UTF-16 source text.
• Find first, multiple, or overlapping normalized matches.
• Highlight normalized matches with Android SpannableString.
• Convert Western, Arabic-Indic, and Eastern Arabic-Indic digits.
• Java-friendly APIs through @JvmStatic and @JvmOverloads.
• A dependency-free Android sample app.
• Unit tests, Android Lint, GitHub Actions CI, and connected-device instrumentation coverage.

Modules

• :arabickit — the Android library.
• :sample — a small XML + ViewBinding demonstration app.

Local verification

./gradlew verifyFoundation

On Windows:

.\gradlew.bat verifyFoundation

Quick usage

Normalize Arabic text

val normalized = ArabicNormalizer.normalize("إِنَّ الــلَّهَ غَفُورٌ")
// "ان الله غفور"

Find original-text ranges

val source = "إِنَّ اللَّهَ غَفُورٌ، إن الله رحيم"

val ranges = ArabicSearch.findAll(
    text = source,
    query = "ان الله",
)

ranges.forEach { range ->
    println(source.substring(range.start, range.endExclusive))
}

The returned offsets target the original source, including its diacritics and tatweel, so they can be used directly with substring or Android spans.

Highlight matches on Android

val highlighted = ArabicHighlighter.highlightBackground(
    text = source,
    query = "ان الله",
    color = Color.YELLOW,
)

textView.text = highlighted

Convert numerals

val western = ArabicNumerals.convert(
    input = "الإصدار ٢٠٢٦",
    target = ArabicNumeralSystem.WESTERN,
)
// "الإصدار 2026"

Compatibility

• Android minSdk 24
• compileSdk 37
• Java bytecode target 17
• Kotlin support is provided by Android Gradle Plugin built-in Kotlin.

Releases

The current release is v0.2.0. Binary AAR assets are available from GitHub Releases.

Project status

ArabicKit 0.2.0 delivers original-text search ranges and Android highlighting. The next planned release is 0.3.0, focused on advanced Arabic utilities. See ROADMAP.md, CHANGELOG.md, and the 0.2.0 implementation plan.

Contributing

Read CONTRIBUTING.md before opening an issue or pull request.

License

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.