# Wrong -\> arrow direction in RTL text contexts

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/wrong-arrow-direction-in-rtl-text-contexts/360760
**Category:** Feature
**Tags:** rtl
**Created:** [April 7, 2025, 2:39pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/wrong-arrow-direction-in-rtl-text-contexts/360760 "2025-04-07T14:39:09Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 1

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### Author: ![NeatNit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/neatnit/32/497918_2.png) [@NeatNit](https://meta.discourse.org/u/NeatNit)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2025, 2:39pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/wrong-arrow-direction-in-rtl-text-contexts/360760/1 "2025-04-07T14:39:09Z")

</div>

**This has nothing to do with bidi settings in Discourse.**

When I type `->` it gets converted into an arrow character `→`, so `A -> B` renders as “A → B”. Pretty cool.

However, the arrow goes the wrong way in RTL text: `א -> ב` renders as: “א → ב” with the arrow going the wrong way. (If you’re reading this in the future after this bug has been fixed, this was rendered as “א → ב”)

Note that the input character sequence here is:

| Character | Name |
| --- | --- |
| א | HEBREW LETTER ALEF |
| | SPACE |
| - | HYPHEN-MINUS |
| \> | GREATER-THAN SIGN |
| | SPACE |
| ב | HEBREW LETTER BET |

which you can verify by copying the string `א -> ב` into this tool: [https://unicodedecode.com/](https://unicodedecode.com/)

This is because arrow characters don’t bidi-mirror in Unicode. Relevant document: [https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2022/22026r-non-bidi-mirroring.pdf](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2022/22026r-non-bidi-mirroring.pdf)

> In particular, arrow and arrow-like characters each often has a mirror character. One could argue that they should have had the Bidi\_Mirrored=Yes property value, but they don’t, and cannot now get that.

There is unfortunately no bidi-flipping arrow character, meaning that if you want to make this substitution correctly, you have to determine the bidi direction of the surrounding text to correctly pick between ← and → arrows. No easy task.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/wrong-arrow-direction-in-rtl-text-contexts/360760)._