How to detect whether a character belongs to a Right To Left language?
You can try using "named blocks" in regular expressions. Just pick out the blocks that are right to left, and form the regex. For example:
\p{IsArabic}|\p{IsHebrew}
If that regex returns true, then there was at least one hebrew or arabic character in the string.
Unicode characters have different properties associated with them. These properties cannot be derived from the code point; you need a table that tells you if a character has a certain property or not.
You are interested in characters with bidirectional property "R" or "AL" (RandALCat).
A RandALCat character is a character with unambiguously right-to-left directionality.
Here's the complete list as of Unicode 3.2 (from RFC 3454):
D. Bidirectional tables D.1 Characters with bidirectional property "R" or "AL" ----- Start Table D.1 ----- 05BE 05C0 05C3 05D0-05EA 05F0-05F4 061B 061F 0621-063A 0640-064A 066D-066F 0671-06D5 06DD 06E5-06E6 06FA-06FE 0700-070D 0710 0712-072C 0780-07A5 07B1 200F FB1D FB1F-FB28 FB2A-FB36 FB38-FB3C FB3E FB40-FB41 FB43-FB44 FB46-FBB1 FBD3-FD3D FD50-FD8F FD92-FDC7 FDF0-FDFC FE70-FE74 FE76-FEFC ----- End Table D.1 -----
Here's some code to get the complete list as of Unicode 6.0:
var url = "http://www.unicode.org/Public/6.0.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt";
var query = from record in new WebClient().DownloadString(url).Split('\n')
where !string.IsNullOrEmpty(record)
let properties = record.Split(';')
where properties[4] == "R" || properties[4] == "AL"
select int.Parse(properties[0], NumberStyles.AllowHexSpecifier);
foreach (var codepoint in query)
{
Console.WriteLine(codepoint.ToString("X4"));
}
Note that these values are Unicode code points. Strings in C#/.NET are UTF-16 encoded and need to be converted to Unicode code points first (see Char.ConvertToUtf32). Here's a method that checks if a string contains at least one RandALCat character:
static void IsAnyCharacterRightToLeft(string s)
{
for (var i = 0; i < s.Length; i += char.IsSurrogatePair(s, i) ? 2 : 1)
{
var codepoint = char.ConvertToUtf32(s, i);
if (IsRandALCat(codepoint))
{
return true;
}
}
return false;
}