Unicode control characters: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:55, 27 January 2021

Revision as of 11:06, 27 January 2021

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Unicode supports standard bidirectional text without any special characters. In other words Unicode conforming software should display right-to-left characters such as Hebrew letters as right-to-left simply from the properties of those characters. Similarly, Unicode handles the mixture of left-to-right-text alongside right-to-left text without any special characters. For example, one can quote Arabic (“بسم الله”) (translated into English as "Bismillah") right alongside English and the Arabic letters will flow from right-to-left and the Latin letters left-to-right.

However, directionality may not be detected correctly if left-to-right text is quoted at the beginning of a right-to-left paragraph (or ''vice versa''),<ref name="segan"/> and the support for bidirectional text becomes even more complicated when text flowing in opposite directions is embedded hierarchically, for example if an English text quotes an Arabic phrase that in turn quotes an English phrase. Other situations may also complicate this, such as when an author wants the left-to-right characters overridden so that they flow from right-to-left. While these situations are fairly rare, Unicode provides twelve characters (U+061C, U+200E, U+200F, U+202A, U+202B, U+202C, U+202D, U+202E, U+2066, U+2067, U+2068, U+2069) to help control these embedded bidirectional text levels up to 125 levels deep.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://unicode.org/reports/tr9/|title=UAX #9: ᗰᗩᗪᖇIᗪTᗴᖇᗴՏᗩ1979@ᘜᗰᗩIᒪ.ᑕOᗰUnicodeUnicode Bidirectional Algorithm|publisher=Unicode Consortium|date=2018-05-09}}</ref>

== Variation selectors ==