Right to left Text HTML input

Question

For my website, i need to provide arabic support. Part of it is to provide input textboxes where when user types in, the new characters have to be appended to the left and the text has to be right aligned.

setting the css property to

text-align:right

didn't work, as i could not get the cursor to come to the left and add letters there. So I removed that property and added

direction:RTL

Here, the cursor came to the left and text was right aligned. but the newly added characters were not getting appended to the left. Instead they were getting appended to the right end only.

How do I fix this? please help..

For example, see the google arabic page search box. I need the exact behavior, although not with those fancy keyboard icon etc., http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=ar

Answer 1

Here's what I can think of:

• Use direction:RTL for the RIGHT alignment
• Write a JavaScript handler attached to the event: "onkeyup", which performs the shifting of the entered character to the LEFT (doing some text processing).

Answer 2

You can use the dir="rtl" on the input. It is supported.

<input dir="rtl" id="foo"/>

Answer 3

function rtl(element)
{   
    if(element.setSelectionRange){
        element.setSelectionRange(0,0);
    }
}




<input type="text" name="textbox" style="direction:RTL;" onkeyup="rtl(this);"/>

This code will do.

Answer 4

Use only direction:RTL and when switched to a proper keyboard (e.g. Arabic) in the system settings, the newly added characters will correctly be appended to the left.

Answer 5

Use on the input in css.

input {
  unicode-bidi:bidi-override;
  direction: RTL;
}

Answer 6

A feature specific to Angular Material, in addition to direction: rtl, is :

.mat-form-field {
   text-align: start!important;
 }

This will work for both RLT & LTR