change writing direction in a textarea box when user change language

[lofaifa]

using javascript i wanna change the writing direction when the user change his language ..

its about some problems with hebrew and arabic since they have rtl directions and my users want to switch bettween english and arabic .. soo default = rtl and when they change language = ltr

 

<textarea class="question" name="question_text"> </textarea>

 

any idea ?

 

 

[nogray]

JavaScript can't tell when the user change the language, what you can do is check the last character the user type and compare it to the language letters and change the directions accordingly. There will be some characters that you should ignore (like ., and numbers)

[lofaifa]

and how can i detect the user language when hes typing something ?

[Adam]

You can detect the user's language using the "Accept-Language" HTTP request header. I don't believe you're able to reliably get this through JavaScript though, so you'd need to use PHP (through $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']). Using that though, as you generate the page you can set the HTML dir attribute or the CSS direction property appropriately.

 

Edit

 

Don't try to detect the user's language as they type. Just base it off the language their browser is configured with (using the header I mentioned before).

[lofaifa]

php isnt dynamic , i will get one value (the browser/user) language , but i need to make the "dir" attribute of the tag change with the user language.

 

soo for example here we have by default 'ltr'

 

soo it will stay ltr as long as i type latin letters , but when ill change the language and switch to arabic for example

the arabic new text start to apear from right to left . this is my problem .

[Adam]

Then you need to define what you mean by "change language"? Is this a drop-down type menu that user selects their language from or something?

[lofaifa]

yes .

or if we want to be more specific , the type of characters "Change" from latin to arabic .. is there a way that when the user change the characters type 'dir' changes also ?

[nogray]

you would actually check the character and compare it to a list of pre-determined characters for different languages.

 

E.g. If I start typing "Something..." you would check the S and find it's not a RTL language

If I start typing "هذا" you would check the characters to your list and determin it's a RTL. Since most languages are LTR, you only need to check if the character is a RTL language character or not.

[Adam]

I'd say it seems excessive to check a character on a key stroke event against (up-to) every character for every right-to-left language. (Admittedly though I have no clue just how many characters that is.) Having said that it's not impossible of course, but I would utilise the server to do the work (through an AJAX request) so that as entering text the textarea doesn't become slow or unresponsive, which may be more likely on mobile browsers. I would offer the option of disabling this too, and making it manually selectable.

[lofaifa]

ok . ill try to go with checking every character

 

thank u

[requinix]

The Arabic Unicode block has 253 characters. The Hebrew block has 87. There are other RTL alphabets. Detecting those characters would be obscene.

 

Enjoy trying to do that.

[lofaifa]

i tried regular expression (arabic range)

 

 

$(document).ready(function(){
	$('.question').keyup(function(){
		var string=$(this).attr('value');
		var last_character=string.substr(-1);
		var last_last_character=string.substr(-2,1);
		var arabic = /[\u0600-\u06FF]/;
		//var character=string.charAt(string.length-1);
		if(last_last_character=='\n' && arabic.test(last_character)==false && last_character!='\n'){
			$('.question').attr('dir', 'ltr');
			}
		else if(last_last_character=='\n' && arabic.test(last_character)==true) {
			$('.question').attr('dir', 'rtl');
		}
	});
});

 

and it worked fine ..

 

(i need to switch direction when the user start a new line and write something in latin . default=rtl)