This is a masked input plugin for the jQuery javascript library. It allows a user to more easily enter fixed width input where you would like them to enter the data in a certain format (dates,phone numbers, etc). It has been tested on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. A mask is defined by a format made up of mask literals and mask definitions. Any character not in the definitions list below is considered a mask literal. Mask literals will be automatically entered for the user as they type and will not be able to be removed by the user.The following mask definitions are predefined:

• a - Represents an alpha character (A-Z,a-z)
• 9 - Represents a numeric character (0-9)
• * - Represents an alphanumeric character (A-Z,a-z,0-9)

If your requirements aren't met by the predefined placeholders, you can always add your own. For example, maybe you need a mask to only allow hexadecimal characters. You can add your own definition for a placeholder, say 'h', like so: $.mask.definitions['h'] = "[A-Fa-f0-9]"; Then you can use that to mask for something like css colors in hex with a mask "#hhhhhh".

By design, this plugin will reject input which doesn't complete the mask. You can bypass this by using a '?' character at the position where you would like to consider input optional. For example, a mask of "(999) 999-9999? x99999" would require only the first 10 digits of a phone number with extension being optional.

jQuery Masked Input uses git tags to publish releases to Bower. We used to just tag directly off of master but this added a lot of cruft - the entire git directory - to our users bower_components directory. A lot of other libraries are nice enough to clean up their distributions and so we should too.

So here is how you go about publishing a new release. This assumes you've updated the version strings in the dist/bower.json and the source js.

    $ git subtree split --prefix dist --branch release

    $ git checkout release

    $ git merge -s subtree master

    $ git tag <VERSION>

    $ git push origin release && git push origin --tags

jQuery Masked Input uses NodeJS and GruntJS as it's developer platform and build automation tool.

To get your environment setup correctly, you'll need nodejs version 0.8.25 or greater installed. You'll also need to install the grunt command line tool:

$ sudo npm install -g grunt-cli

Once node is installed on your system all that you need to do is install the developer dependencies and run the grunt build:

$ npm install
$ grunt

All of the tests for jQuery Masked Input are run using the jasmine test runner.