I considering input rewriting (transformation, conversion, etc, use the verb of your choice) to be an essential part of validation.
This means phone numbers, SSN, dates, credit card numbers, etc should all accept "loose" input types and should be standardized for backend processing. (Personal Pet Peeve - sites that instruct you not to use spaces or hyphens in credit card numbers) This article makes the general case: http://www.hising.net/2007/03/30/form-validation-with-javascript/ The article for the popular validation plugin notes the above article, but doesn't offer code for this particular point (See #6): http://bassistance.de/2007/07/04/about-client-side-form-validation-and-frameworks/ It does point out the masked input plugin, but my goal is not to provide hints to the user on how to take additional effort but rather to save them effort in the first place. Both of these articles date from 2 years ago. Googling for existing plugins has not led me to happiness. I'll happily write my own plugin if it is not reinventing the wheel, but I'd love to have some compatibility with the validate plugin. Does anyone have suggestions for the best approach for doing so? The transformation can be done front-end (i.e. visible to the user, changing the value in the inputs) or internally (standardizing the values sent to the validate plugin), I'm not picky as to which just yet. -- Brett Ritter / SwiftOne swift...@swiftone.org
