Know of any invisible right-to-left characters in Unicode?

A common problem with right-to-left text and many text editors is that while the actual right-to-left characters are written right-to-left, the punctuation (nominally) following such a sentence is switched back to left-to-right mode again.

This results in, for example, Hebrew text not followed but preceeded by a question mark.

The problem can be dealt with by adding another right-to-left character after the punctuation. But that is certainly not a good solution.

So I am wondering whether there is an invisible right-to-left character in Unicode that I could add after punctuation at the end of right-to-left text in order to get the effect of adding another character but not the sight of it.

Any ideas?

Or any other ideas to solve the problem?

Andrew J. Brehm

Posted 2009-11-11T09:21:33.967

Reputation: 4 411

Answers

Does U+200F "RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK Right-to-left zero-width character" work? There's a few others listed at UAX #9: Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm.

TRS-80

Posted 2009-11-11T09:21:33.967

Reputation: 2 923

when you right lick in textboxes and many text applications (like Notepad) you'll see a context menu with "Insert Unicode control characters" with RTL and LTR overriding characters so it's actually easy to type in most cases – phuclv – 2019-09-06T01:42:54.000

I fear program might just ignore it. It's also difficult to type. – Andrew J. Brehm – 2009-11-11T16:15:24.910

You don't want a \u200F. You want \u202C The Pop Directional Formatting character.

Evan Carroll

Posted 2009-11-11T09:21:33.967

Reputation: 1

I believe that openoffice allows you to do this (Add the zero-width space) with a SPACE bar + one of the Meta keys. This is certainly the case in Lao and Thai scripts.

macarthy

Posted 2009-11-11T09:21:33.967

Reputation: 103