Simon Willison’s Weblog

Understanding Bidirectional (BIDI) Text in Unicode. It turns out you need to sanitise user input to ensure there are no unicode characters that switch your site’s regular text to RTL.

Posted 15th March 2009 at 4:37 am

Recent articles

Wilson Lin on FastRender: a browser built by thousands of parallel agents - 23rd January 2026
First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's general agent - 12th January 2026
My answers to the questions I posed about porting open source code with LLMs - 11th January 2026

bidi 1 cal-henderson 7 filtering 2 security 573 unicode 29 userinput 1

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