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Jul 29, 2026
Reversing Text Is Harder Than It Looks — Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, Grapheme Clusters, and the Trojan Source Attack
Reversing Arabic text character-by-character produces nonsensical output — Arabic is stored in logical reading order and reversed by a rendering engine, so reversing code points produces different words backward, not mirrored text. Here's how Unicode's bidirectional algorithm assigns direction to each character, why emoji sequences need grapheme cluster reversal rather than code-point reversal, and how the Trojan Source vulnerability exploited RLO (Right-to-Left Override) control characters to hide malicious code in source file reviews.