U+202E
RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE
Bidi override. Displayed order can differ from stored order.
- Codepoint
- U+202E
- Short
- RLO
- Group
bidi-control- Class
invisible- Default
- removed
- Replaced by
- removed, no substitute
What it is
The right-to-left override forces everything after it to be displayed in reverse order, regardless of what the characters themselves are. It is the sharpest of the bidirectional controls, because it overrides rather than hints.
Where it comes from
It is the character at the centre of Trojan Source, the 2021 finding that source code can be made to display in one order and compile in another. It also has a long history in filenames, where it can make an executable appear to end in a harmless extension.
When it belongs
Whenever the document genuinely contains right-to-left content. TraceFree PRO checks for that before touching anything here, and holds back when it finds it.
In a document with no right-to-left text at all, a bidi control has nothing to do, and its presence is worth a second look.
What TraceFree PRO does with it
| Preset | Action |
|---|---|
conservative | asked about |
default | removed |
report-only | asked about |
strict | removed |
Context guards can only ever make a cleanup gentler, never sharper. A rule saying “always remove” does not override them.
How to remove it
In TraceFree PRO, turn on the clipboard watcher and copy the text. On the command line:
tracefree clean --backup document.txt
pbpaste | tracefree clean | pbcopyReport without changing anything — exit code 1 on findings, so it works in CI:
tracefree check -r ./docsHow to write it
This page never prints the character itself, only ways of writing it. A page about invisible characters that contained invisible characters would be unreviewable — and that is the problem the program exists to solve.
| Notation | Value |
|---|---|
| Unicode | U+202E |
| Rust | \u{202E} |
| JavaScript, Python | \u202E |
| HTML | ‮ ‮ |
| Regex (PCRE, Rust) | \x{202E} |
Related characters
Try it on your own text
Paste anything into the browser demo and see what is in it. Same engine as the app, running entirely on your device — nothing is uploaded.
