This is a variation on the brain-damaged credit card number input
field (where they couldn't be bothered to add one line of code to
filter out spaces, but go to the effort to document this limitation --
or not) that you all know and hate.
This time it's a phone number. The difference is that whereas credit
card numbers only contain spaces for non-digits, phone numbers are
written (at least in the US, at least by people who aren't trying to
be avante garde dorks by deliberately using bogus formats) as (123)
456-7890.
This field was annotated with the message "Please do not use dashes".
Very well, then. I enter "123 456 7890" (after deleting the hyphen I
initially forgot to omit) and submit.
I get the error "Please enter a valid phone number using the following
format: 5551234."
Wait, what? I can't use an area code? WTF?
Oh. Obviously, the reason it asks me not to use dashes is because it
can't handle dashes *or spaces*.
And apparently the error message was lifted from an older, pre-area-
code program that was written in the 1950s. Although I'm not sure how
they got Apache to talk to perl, since CGI hadn't been invented yet.
Josh
P.S. Adding '$num =~ s/[() -]//g' before the validation would be
prohibitively invasive and costly. Of course, gratuitously converting
my email address to all caps (in violation of every version of the
standard) is no problem.
