Java Character.isMirrored() Method

The Character.isMirrored() method in Java is a built-in method of the java.lang.Character class. This method is used to check if a character is mirrored according to the Unicode specification. Mirrored characters are those whose glyphs are horizontally mirrored when displayed in right-to-left (RTL) text.

For example, the character "\u0028" LEFT PARENTHESIS is semantically defined to be an opening parenthesis. This will appears as "(" in text that is left-to-right (LTR) text, but it is displayed as ")" in RTL text. Some common mirrored characters include brackets like [ ], { }, and parentheses ( ).

Syntax of Character.isMirrored() Method

public static boolean isMirrored(char ch)

• Parameters: ch: The character for which the mirrored property is requested.
• Returns: This method returns "true" if the char is mirrored else it returns "false" if the character is not mirrored or undefined.

Examples of Java Character.isMirrored() Method

Example 1: In this example, we are going to check some common symbols.

// Java program to check if characters 
// are mirrored using isMirrored()
import java.lang.Character;

public class Geeks {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        // Defining characters to test
        char ch1 = '[';
        char ch2 = '+';
        char ch3 = '}';
        char ch4 = '(';

        // checking and printing whether 
        // each character is mirrored
        System.out.println(ch1 + " is mirrored: " 
        + Character.isMirrored(ch1));
        System.out.println(ch2 + " is mirrored: " 
        + Character.isMirrored(ch2));
        System.out.println(ch3 + " is mirrored: " 
        + Character.isMirrored(ch3));
        System.out.println(ch4 + " is mirrored: " 
        + Character.isMirrored(ch4));
    }
}

[ is mirrored: true
+ is mirrored: false
} is mirrored: true
( is mirrored: true

Explanation: In this example, we can see that characters like "[" and "{" are mirrored but symbols like "+" are not considered mirrored.

Example 2: In this example, we are going to check digits and alphanumeric characters.

// Java program to test digits and 
// other characters for mirrored status
import java.lang.Character;

public class Geeks {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        // defining digit characters
        char ch1 = '4';
        char ch2 = '0';

        // checking and printing mirrored status
        System.out.println(ch1 + " is mirrored: " 
        + Character.isMirrored(ch1));
        System.out.println(ch2 + " is mirrored: " 
        + Character.isMirrored(ch2));
    }
}

4 is mirrored: false
0 is mirrored: false

Explanation: Numbers and most letters are not mirrored characters in Unicode.

Important Points:

• This method is very helpful when we are designing applications that supports bidirectional (BiDi) text for languages like Arabic or Hebrew.
• It allows us to programmatically check if a character will need to be flipped horizontally in RTL environments.