RTLtextarea

Automatically detects RTL (right-to-left) languages and appropriately configures the text input, without having to manually specify CSS direction or dir property on page load. Allows automatic switching between LTR and RTL languages.

What it does

This module will set the direction of a textarea to RTL when a threshold of RTL characters has been reached (rtlThreshold). It also applies Twitter- specific RTL rules regarding the placement of @ signs, # tags, and URLs.

Before:

After:

How to use

Bind keyup and keydown to RTLText.onTextChange. If you have initial text, call RTLText.setText(textarea, initial_string) to set markers on that initial text.

  $(document).ready(function(){
    var $textarea = $('#someTextarea');
    $textarea.on('keyup', RTLText.onTextChange);
    $textarea.on('keydown', RTLText.onTextChange);
    RTLText.setText($textarea.get(0), $textarea.val());
  });

When storing or submitting the text, make sure to extract the unicode markers first:

  var textToSubmit = RTLText.cleanText($("#someTextarea").val());

Get the length of the text minus the control characters:

  var textLength = RTLText.textLength($("#someTextarea").val());

Add markers to a string without affecting the text box:

  var stringWithMarkers = RTLText.addRTLMarkers(string);

Versioning

We use semantic versioning, as described here: http://semver.org/

Releases are numbered and constructed with the following guidelines:

• Breaking backwards compatibility bumps the major
• New additions without breaking backwards compatibility bumps the minor
• Bug fixes and misc changes bump the patch

Testing

Tests use Jasmine and PhantomJS.

Before running the tests for the first time, install the required packages by typing: npm update.

After the packages are installed, you can run the tests by typing: npm test.

Authors

Naoki Takano

• https://github.com/hontent
• @honten

Esten Hurtle

• https://github.com/estenh
• @esten

License

Copyright 2012 Twitter, Inc.

Licensed under the MIT License