Editing Bidirectional text (section)

{{Short description|Text that contains both LTR and RTL text}}
{{More citations needed|date=July 2015}}
{{hatnote|Some web browsers may display the Hebrew text in this article in the reverse direction.}}

A '''bidirectional text''' contains two [[text direction]]alities, [[right-to-left]] (RTL) and [[left-to-right]] (LTR). It generally involves text containing different types of [[alphabet]]s, but may also refer to [[boustrophedon]], which is changing text direction in each row.

An example is the RTL Hebrew name Sarah: {{Lang|he|שרה}}, spelled sin (ש) on the right, resh (ר) in the middle, and heh (ה) on the left. Many computer programs failed to display this correctly, because they were designed to display text in one direction only.

Some so-called [[right-to-left script]]s such as the [[Persian alphabet|Persian script]] and Arabic are mostly, but not exclusively, right-to-left—mathematical expressions, numeric dates and numbers bearing units are embedded from left to right. That also happens if text from a left-to-right language such as English is embedded in them; or vice versa, if Arabic is embedded in a left-to-right script such as English.