Text Direction issue with displaying strings

[iyuen]

I have a problem I hope someone can help with. My MIDlet lets the user enter some text and then I display it in a Canvas using drawString. I use a basic word wrap algorithm to handle longer, multi-line text, nothing fancy. Everything is fine except if the user enters text in languages that are written right-to-left. Say the user enters some Hebrew or Arabic, I want to know this and thus right-align the text when drawn.

My question is, how can I detect whether the user's input is a right-to-left or a left-to-right language? I just want to know which text to left-align and which to right-align, since the user can enter any string into the input. Any suggestions?

[balagopalks]

You could use System.getProperty("microedition.locale") to identify the phone's current locale.

Regards
Gopal

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[iyuen]

Ok, but it doesn't tell me what text the user has input. The phone may be set to one locale, but the user can still enter something different. Right?

[knorring]

Ok, but it doesn't tell me what text the user has input. The phone may be set to one locale, but the user can still enter something different. Right?

Interesting problem.

How about this approach: You could examine the String object the user has entered and scan through it character by character. If the characters belong to the range that Hebrew characters are in (looking at the hexadecimal Unicode values from http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0590.pdf), then the string is Hebrew and should be displayed right-to-left, ie. aligned to the right.

[iyuen]

How about this approach: You could examine the String object the user has entered and scan through it character by character. If the characters belong to the range that Hebrew characters are in (looking at the hexadecimal Unicode values from http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0590.pdf), then the string is Hebrew and should be displayed right-to-left, ie. aligned to the right.

That sounds feasible, I'll give it a shot! If someone has a more elegant approach, please let me know.