How to detect that text typed in text-area is RTL

javascript jquery html css right-to-left
Nick Ginanto picture Nick Ginanto · Dec 5, 2012 · Viewed 9.8k times · Source

I have a textarea in which the user can enter text in english (or any other left-to-right language) or in a language that is RTL.

When the user writes in RTL, the user must press Right-shift + ctrl in order to make the text be aligned to the right and be rtl. However, in windows (and probably other modern OSes) the user can set any key combination to switch language and text direction.

I know how to display text as RTL, but how will I know which direction to display?

Is there a way to detect that the text typed in a textarea/text-field was typed as RTL?

Answer

s3v3n picture s3v3n · Nov 20, 2013

I've come up to a more simple and nice solution. Just add dir="auto" to the elements and the browser will do it's job!

See: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_global_dir.asp

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