[Techtalk] character directionality hack

Rachel McConnell rachel at xtreme.com
Wed Jan 17 21:42:39 UTC 2007


Hi Experts,

I've just seen a really interesting small hack that I don't understand 
yet, and am hoping someone here can explain, or point me at references.

On one page of our site, there is some text that is displayed 
right-to-left instead of left-to-right (the site is nearly all in 
English with no charset specified).  It appears to have been done by 
some nonstandard characters that a user put in their login name.  I have 
put a tiny example showing only the affected section here:

http://www.crazedweasels.com/reverseDirection.html

This server specifies a charset, though, so you can't see the behavior 
from that link, but if you download it and look at it as a file (at 
least in Firefox), you should see the odd behaviour.

Has anyone seen this before?  I haven't even worked out a good way, yet, 
to figure out what the characters in the author's login name ARE.  I 
know there is a great deal of information on Unicode and charsets and 
directionality, and I'll dive into that soon enough, but I'd love any 
pointers on this specific thing!

Thanks,
Rachel


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