This chapter contains recipes for validating and formatting common types of user input. Some of the solutions show how to allow variations of valid input, such as U.S. postal codes that can contain either five or nine digits. Others are designed to harmonize or fix commonly understood formats for things such as phone numbers, dates, and credit card numbers.
Beyond helping you get the job done by eliminating invalid input, these recipes can also improve the user experience of your applications. Messages such as “no spaces or hyphens” next to phone or credit card number fields often frustrate users or are simply ignored. Fortunately, in many cases regular expressions allow you to let users enter data in formats with which they are familiar and comfortable, with very little extra work on your part.
Certain programming languages provide functionality similar to some recipes in this chapter through their native classes or libraries. Depending on your needs, it might make more sense to use these built-in options, so we’ll point them out along the way.
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