Re: mildly OT from bidi - curious email

[Arthur Reutenauer via Unicode]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2019 at 02:30:24PM +, Julian Bradfield via Unicode wrote:
> So far, so common. The curious thing is that the (entirely
> ASCII) company name was enclosed in a left-to-right direction, thus:
> 
> Subject: Your Aaa Ltd receipt [#-]
> 
> where  and  are the bidi control characters.
> 
> I don't think I've seen this before - I wonder why it happened?

  Maybe Stripe stores merchant names with surrounding bidi control
characters, so that they’re always rendered in the appropriate
direction, even by systems that don’t implement the bidi algorithm?
Since the subject is clearly generated automatically from at least three
different sources, I can imagine wanting this sort of weak guarantee
that merchant names are always marked with the correct writing
direction, even if they’re embedded in a different-language string.  The
directional characters would only need to be added once.

Best,

Arthur

mildly OT from bidi - curious email

[Julian Bradfield via Unicode]

The current bidi discussion prompts me to post a curiosity I received
today.

I ordered something from a (UK) company, and the payment receipt came
via Stripe. So far, so common. The curious thing is that the (entirely
ASCII) company name was enclosed in a left-to-right direction, thus:

Subject: Your Aaa Ltd receipt [#-]

where  and  are the bidi control characters.

I don't think I've seen this before - I wonder why it happened?

Also today I got an otherwise ASCII message where every paragraph
started with BOM (or ZWNBSP as my font prefers to call it). I see from
the web that people used to do this - anybody know what the most
common software packages that do it are?



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