Unicode Demystified

Bidirectional Text in a Text-Editing Environment

Bidirectional text poses a few challenging problems for text-editing applications. Consider our earlier example:

This is represented in memory as follows:

U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
U+0042 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B
U+0043 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C
U+05D0 HEBREW LETTER ALEF
U+05D1 HEBREW LETTER BET
U+05D2 HEBREW LETTER GIMEL

Let's say you click to place the insertion point here:

This position is ambiguous. It can be between the letter C and the letter , or it can be at the end of the string, after the ...