More input mask tweaks for Marketo Forms

[SanfordWhiteman]

You've seen before that the Forms 2.0 input mask plugin can be tweaked to do some more elegant stuff.

Here are a few more things you might want to do. I only recommend masks for things that have an explicit standard (like phone numbers, credit cards, etc.). But if you're going to use them for more than that, use them wisely!

The code is bundled at the bottom of the post.

SUPPRESS THE UNDERSCORE AS THE PLACEHOLDER

By default, the mask shows a _ character in every empty position up to the max length.

This can look ugly, especially if there's already a hint in the field telling people it's limited to N characters.

You can remove the placeholder character entirely or replace it with something else (though I'm not sure anything is better than underscore or blank in this case, maybe a cursor block like ░ if you want to be retro-cool?).

ACCEPT ANY LATIN-1 LETTER, NOT JUST A-Z AND a-z

When you select the a shortcut in the Form Editor…

… you're actually blocking all but the slimmest subset of alphanumeric characters.Even the e-with-acute-accent in Grégoire is blocked! That's not good when words contain these slightly out-of-the-American-ordinary characters.

It works this way because, under the hood, input masks use the regex character class [A-Za-z] to implement a. And that's ASCII unaccented letters only.

The better move is to use a class like [A-Za-z\u00C0-\u024F] which includes Latin accented letters, i.e. those from Romance languages. (You'll still be blocking people who spell their names using other glyphs, but that's another matter.)

Better still, if you're in the world of names, allow hyphens, apostrophes, periods, and spaces: [A-Za-z\u00C0-\u024F'. -].

ALLOW SPACES, NOT JUST CHARACTERS

When you set a mask to **********, even if you don't want non-ASCII, non-accented characters, do you really mean that spaces aren't allowed? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

In the case of ISBN-10s, for example, no spaces are allowed per the international standard, and you might want to block spaces in the Phone field for standardization.

But in the case of First or Last Name, Company, or tons of other cases, you certainly don't want to block spaces.

MAKE IT HAPPEN

All of the above functions can be enabled with the helper JS below.

First, in Form Editor, give each field you want to re-mask an initial mask (any mask pattern will do). (If it isn't masked to begin with, we can't tweak the mask setup.)

Then add your custom patterns to the inputMasks array as below: the name property is the Marketo form field name and the rest is explained in the comments.

(function() {
   MktoForms2.$("body").on("mkto_inputmask_polyfilled", function(e) {
      var inputMasks = [
         {
            name: "Title",
            maskPattern: "ssssssssss", // 10 [A-Za-z ] letters or spaces
            maskCharPlaceholder: "" // no placeholder char
         },
         {
            name: "Nickname",
            maskPattern: "nnnnnnnnn", // 10 [A-Za-z0-9 ] chars or spaces
            maskCharPlaceholder: "" // no placeholder char
         },
         {
            name: "Interest",
            maskPattern: "cccccccccc", // 10 Latin letters or (some) Latin puncuation marks
            maskCharPlaceholder: "░" // alternate placeholder char to show how it's done
         }
      ];


      /* --- NO NEED TO TOUCH BELOW THIS LINE! --- */

      MktoForms2.whenReady(function(form) {
         var maskCharExtensions = {
            c: "[A-Za-z\u00C0-\u024F'. -]",
            s: "[A-Za-z ]",
            n: "[A-Za-z0-9 ]"
         };

         Object.keys(maskCharExtensions)
            .forEach(function(char) {
              MktoForms2.$.mask.definitions[char] = this[char];
         }, maskCharExtensions);

         inputMasks
            .map(function(field) {
               field.el$ = form
                  .getFormElem()
                  .find("[name='" + field.name + "']");
               return field;
            })
            .forEach(function(field) {
               var mask =
                     typeof field.maskPattern != "undefined"
                        ? field.maskPattern
                        : field.el$.data("mktoInputMask"),
                  placeholder =
                     typeof field.maskCharPlaceholder != "undefined"
                        ? field.maskCharPlaceholder
                        : MktoForms2.$.mask.placeholder;

               field.el$.mask(mask, { placeholder: placeholder });
            });
      });
   });
})();