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The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

41 points by dado3212

by Georgelemental

0 subcomment

If you are using plain text and don't have access to HTML or CSS markup, you can follow the RTL character with U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK to achieve the same effect. And even if you do have access to those things, using U+200E ensures that operations that strip markup (like copy-paste) don't break your text.

by dhosek

1 subcomments

Mixing R-L and L-R scripts (as has been discussed here on many occasions) is a ripe arena for mysterious behavior. Given that even monolingual texts in R-L scripts will often include L-R characters, it can get hairy quickly. A desire to try to avoid having visible markers in text around the transitions is partly why the Unicode spec around bidi text is so complicated.

by YokoZar

0 subcomment

A fun hack I remember was that Windows internally used two left-to-right control characters in a window title as an indicator that the entire window should have its content flipped right to left, images and all (imagine a clock animation running counter-clockwise).
This meant that if you could control the window title somehow you could create some surprising behavior, such as putting both those characters at the beginning of a post on a web forum and then having both the web page and browser look backward after someone opened the link.
I believe most things filter for this now, of course.

by Dwedit

0 subcomment

by rhplus

1 subcomments

Disappointed that xn--sei.com or <insert fleuron here>.com is apparently registered but not redirecting to ornately decorated texts.

by SoftTalker

2 subcomments

by wang_li

2 subcomments

The Unicode committee needs to be dissolved or else Unicode is going to evolve into a full page markup scheme to rival pdf.