[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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