Re: OT (Kind of): Determining whether Locales are left-to-right or

[John Cowan]

David Tooke wrote:

> The application is a database application where the majority of fields are
> from a Unicode database and user-entered.  Their text is likely to be in
> Arabic.  Therefore, as far as I am concerned, the *content* of the page is
> in Arabic not English despite it being an English application.  So the page
> should be formatted as if it an Arabic page with some English text.

You're the boss, but it still sounds like an English page with embedded Arabic
text to me.

> As it is a Unicode database; I do not want to try to determine what
> language/script *exactly* is being used.  That would involve scanning the
> Unicode characters and a lot more jiggery-pokery than I need.

The Unicode folks have nicely arranged that the RTL characters are all going
to be in the ranges U+0590 through U+08FF and U+10800 to U+10FFF, of which
only the first range matters just yet.  This is a rather modest test, and
probably more reliable than using the browser setting.

-- 
There is / one art                   || John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
no more / no less                    || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things                   || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness                 \\ -- Piet Hein