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Masking

Working with TextField Masks

Issue: 8.5 (July/August 2010)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 17,885
Starting Page Number: 53
Article Number: 8508
Resource File(s):

8508.zip Updated: 2010-07-05 16:14:46

Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

An often overlooked but extremely powerful feature of REALbasic's TextField control is its mask property. The mask allow you to specify, in advance, what types of data the field can handle. It's great for forcing data to be well-formatted, such as telephone numbers and Zip codes that have a specific format (though you should be aware that different countries often have different formatting). However, masking is so powerful it can be intimidating if you haven't used it, so today we're going to explore the feature in detail.

In principle, masking is simple. You just build a string of placeholder characters and stick it in a textfield's mask property. You're done. In practice, those placeholders can be tricky business and you may still need to check for errors and do some post-entry data massaging.

In the Old Days

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