{"id":71,"date":"2009-06-06T14:34:44","date_gmt":"2009-06-06T12:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.angeredbrackets.com\/?p=71"},"modified":"2009-06-06T14:36:15","modified_gmt":"2009-06-06T12:36:15","slug":"inserting-bidi-support-tags-in-online-textareas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.angeredbrackets.com\/wordpress\/2009\/06\/inserting-bidi-support-tags-in-online-textareas\/","title":{"rendered":"Inserting BiDi support tags in online Textareas"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post will only be relevant to readers of right-to-left languages, and to developers who develop for such languages. As such, my next post will be a translation of this one into Hebrew.
\nA bit over a year ago, a friend of mine wrote about embedded unicode right-to-left and left-to-right characters in a flow of text<\/a>. In a nutshell, when writing text that contains both LTR characters (like English) and RTL characters (like Hebrew), the flow of the text can wind up messed up. Here’s an example:
\n<\/p>\n

The (proper) solution to this conundrum is this: wrap your text, which you want flowing in the opposite direction from it’s encapsulating element, in the unicode characters for left-to-right embedding<\/a> (or right-to-left embedding<\/a>), and the Pop Directional Formatting<\/a> character. For further reading, go here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Back when Liron wrote that post of his, I thought it would be a nice little project to tackle – write a Firefox plugin or Greasemonkey user-script that allows you to encapsulate your text in these characters, for the sake of all those who will follow and read it. I have since then become familiar – and very fond of – bookmarklets. I think a bookmarklet is the best way to distribute the solution to this problem, because it’s lightweight, easy to install and modify, and (at least in theory) cross browser.<\/p>\n

Coming to tackle this issue, I knew I needed to insert a string of characters in front of and after the selected text in a textarea. Where have I seen this done before?… Oh, right, right here in WordPress, when I want to make text I’m writing bold or italicized.
\nSo I went about finding the Javascript behind that functionality (it’s the function edInsertTag), and I pulled out of it the bits that are relevant to this situation, and to Firefox.<\/p>\n

With no further ado, I present to you RTL<\/a> and LTR<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Simply drag those two links to your bookmark toolbar (I actually have a bookmark folder just for bookmarklets), and next time you’re writing bidirectional text, select the wrongly-flowing part, and align it properly.
\nYou can try them out here:
\n