ms word find/replace highlighted text, doesn't work on this mix of hebrew and english in right to left mode

Question

I have this word document

one could produce it manually, or download it from http://ge.tt/8zgZScd2 with firefox(chrome blocks that site for no good reason). Or you can download it from here

You see four highlighted sets of characters.

The first one is hebrew then english, in left to right mode. (LTR mode)

The second third and fourth, are english then hebrew, in right to left mode. (RTL mode)

I'm using ctrl with left shift to go to LTR mode, and ctrl with right shift to switch to RTL mode.

The hebrew letters are e.g. unicode \u05D0 א but any will do.

Here is the find and replace

So in the 'find' section, I have put in to find highlighted text. (that option exists if one clicks format..highlight, in the bottom left of that dialog box)

In the replace section I wrote XXX^&XXX in ms word ^& is ms word's way of saying what most would call \0 i.e. it's the text that was found. So my find and replace should be finding highlighted text and keeping it but putting an XXX before and after it.

Here is the result of that find/replace

As you can see, the first one worked. That's the one with hebrew then english and LTR mode.

The second third and fourth, failed. Those are the ones with english then hebrew in right to left mode.

I would like to get the find/replace to work for the last three, i.e. those second third and fourth, those with english then hebrew in right to left mode.

added

It looked a bit like it was wrapping the XXX around the hebrew but wasn't clear why. Though that isn't what is happening / how / why it's doing this.

Scott suggests using a replacement string of FOO^&BAR to try to determine more what's happening for the purposes of troubleshooting, and it does clarify what's happening. If you have אאאabc in LTR mode and you replace it with FOO^&BAR ms word sees that and shows as FOOאאאabcBAR which is all fine. If you put that in RTL mode it doesn't make FOOabcאאאBAR or BARabcאאאFOO. It makes abcBARאאאFOO(i.e. it mixed the FOO BAR into it). What it is doing, and I guess one can't fault ms word for doing this, it sees abcBAR as a chunk. Similarly(And more clearly), if you have abcאאא in RTL and you replace it with FOO^&BAR then it replaces it with abcBARאאאFOO because the end if where the abc is and the end of the abc is after the 'c', so it sticks the BAR there. I will consider what to do re this, but that's what's happening. Maybe there's some kind of null hebrew character or right to left character that I can put after 'c' that will 'fix' this so I can wrap FOO..BAR around it.

Answer 1

The behavior described above is correct by design and consistent with the implementation of bi-directional text support.

First, a solution to your requirement as I understand it.

If you want to wrap those RTL examples with some prefix and suffix and have them visually appear to the right and to the left of your original highlighted text, you can place an RLM control character after your prefix and it will behave the way you want.

You can add an RLM by clicking the "Special" button in the find/replace dialog and choosing RTL Mark, or you can just type ^r manually. I'm going to use the texts PRE and POST (instead of the XXX in your examples):

If you use this "Replace with" text with one of your RTL examples:

Then you get this result, which I think is the result you were seeking:

So what's happening?

In your RTL examples you have a text that consists of two parts or two "directional runs". The first is a LTR run (the "abcd" part) and the second is a RTL run (the Hebrew "אאא" part), all within a paragraph that has a RTL base direction.

When you add an LTR prefix (the first "XXX" in your replace example) to the LTR run, you're just making that run a bit longer, like adding a few more letters to the first word. Since LTR runs are drawn from left to right, those new characters appear where they should. If instead of "abcd" you used the word "stand" and then added the prefix "UNDER" the resulting word would have been "UNDERstand" (not "standUNDER").

To help deal with situations like this and manually solve some ambiguities, Unicode provides "control characters" which are invisible markers, each with its own role or effect.

The Right-to-Left Mark (RLM) behaves like a RTL character (imagine a zero width letter "א"). If we place that character right after our prefix, we effectively break that LTR run I described above with a Hebrew character. Now the text renders visually as you require, with the prefix appearing first, at the very right edge, then our invisible Hebrew character, and then the original "abcd".