How to prepare bidirectional text for use with wordcloud2.js - text

Question

I have an index array of nested two-dimensional arrays whose element pairs consist each of a phrase and a number.
In the absence of bidirectional text the phrase appears before the number for each element of the index array. In the presence of bidirectional text the phrase appears after the number.
If the phrase-number pairs are mixed -- namely, some phrase-number pairs appear with LTR text and some phrase-number pairs appear with RTL text, then the resulting order is mixed and makes for a messy list that cannot be used for input into the wordcloud.js function.
I have tried reversing the order of the elements of the phrase-number pairs whose phrases are written RTL before they are pushed onto the index array, but to no avail. The resulting index array is rendered confused.
var listItem = [];
var list = [];
$.each(countedPhrases, function(phrase, count) {
console.log('phrase: ' + phrase);
console.log('count: ' + count);
listItem = [phrase, count];
console.log('listItem: ' + listItem);
list.push(listItem);
});
console.log('list: ' + list);'
Sample console.log output.
phrase: النادر
count: 321
listItem: النادر,321
phrase: وتتلقاه
count: 321
listItem: وتتلقاه,321
phrase: 終結
count: 321
listItem: 終結,321
phrase: Podcast
count: 45
listItem: Podcast,45
list: النادر,321, وتتلقاه,321,終結,321,Podcast,45

Answer 1

The problem was resolved by wrapping the Arabic text in the following two Unicode controls \u2067 Arabic Text \u2069 before reading it into the array elements.
Without going into a lot of detail the code that corrected the problem appears as follows:
if (name === 'searchKeyword') {
if (agex.test(value)) {
nakedArabic = value.match(agex);
searchItem.target = '\u2067' + nakedArabic.join('') + '\u2069';
} else {
searchItem.target = value;
}
}
where agex.text(value) is a Regex test for the presence of Arabic characters.
In brief, the problem was brought about by something called spillover. The two Unicode control characters isolate the Arabic text while preserving its natural right-to-left directional ordering.
You can learn more about the problem and solution here.
Roddy